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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27980811">The Stars Will Be Watching Us</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/onnari/pseuds/onnari'>onnari</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Character Study, Dissociation, Edelgard von Hresvelg-centric, Existentialism, Grief/Mourning, Hope vs. Despair, Implied/Referenced Torture, Multi, Pre-Timeskip | Academy Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Slow Burn, Time Loop, Trauma, Trust Issues, Truth Seeking, Uneasy Allies, Vulnerability</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-05-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 16:54:45</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>41,978</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27980811</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/onnari/pseuds/onnari</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The 7th of Pegasus Moon, Year 1180</p><p>On the eve of finally departing to assume the throne, all her greatest plans about to unfold, Edelgard finds the dawn never comes—no matter how many times she lives through the same evening.</p><p>But she's not as alone as she first thinks. Someone else who dreams of the dawn is repeating the night with her.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Black Eagles Students &amp; Edelgard von Hresvelg, Edelgard von Hresvelg &amp; Claude von Riegan, Edelgard von Hresvelg/Claude von Riegan</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>48</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>111</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Sometimes you pick up a game knowing absolutely nothing—only to see a friend is into a ship and have it completely rewire your gaming experience. When I say the brainrot is deep and pervasive, I mean this idea has been haunting me since before I’d even finished my first playthrough. The rough draft is now finally complete so I know where we’re going and I hope you’re ready for these two to circle each other endlessly.</p><p>Izzy, thanks for the beta and all the support.</p><p>Title comes from “A Moment of Happiness” by Rumi.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Sleep will not come. Edelgard has given up on it hours ago.</p><p>At her bedside a candle burns brightly, a vigil for all her plans, even as it brings livened shadows to her bedroom walls. They beckon and repel her in turn, maybe shades of her family, summoned by her own thoughts.</p><p>Tomorrow she goes to see her father, the only family she has left. Family she will lose soon, too.</p><p>She will do right by them in the brief time that is left to her.</p><p>The candle burns low, the wick and the night approaching its end. She stands, already fully dressed, and crosses to the window. Through the first dusting of snow her eyes strain for the first glimpse of light.</p><p>The impossible happens instead.</p><p>A sudden wash of light, warm and red. Sounds crashing together, different pitches, different tones. Voices. The clatter of wood against flagstones, metal against porcelain.</p><p>The familiar clanging of the monastery’s bells, signaling dusk.</p><p>Ferdinand sits before her in the dining hall, unperturbed save for the words he’s directing at her. Words she’s already heard. Yesterday, over dinner. Here, in this very spot, over the same exact meal.</p><p>“I only think it rather discourteous of Hubert to secretly make off on his own,” Ferdinand argues, his plate untouched.</p><p>Edelgard listens with one ear, the other trained on her surroundings, waiting for some answer to present itself. Deja vu? A dream? But the moment only continues, too vivid to be denied, everything deceivingly normal. She can spare Ferdinand no more than the response she gave him the first time they’d had this conversation.</p><p>“It was a private matter that took him away, Ferdinand,” she says, voice controlled and precise. “It would not do to share it widely. Otherwise, I would appreciate it if you took up any personal issues with Hubert directly.”</p><p>“But does it not concern you?” he argues back, just as before. “If there’s one person he would have told it would be you, yet you also kept your silence. How can we have a harmonious house if you are never in proper communication? We’ve all been on edge enough, with all the recent happenings at the monastery. We do not need more uncertainty coming from within our house.”</p><p>Edelgard breathes steadily through the speech. Does not let panic run away with her. Realistic or not, this cannot be reality. Perhaps she fell asleep after all, and she will wake in her bed, maybe even feeling partially rested.</p><p>She wills it to happen, ignoring Ferdinand until he huffs off in a fluster. Wills it as she tracks right back to her room, blazing past other students and any notice she garners.</p><p>Soundly, she throws her bedroom door shut behind her, accomplishing nothing. Another barrier she’s put up against the world only to be left with disquieting thoughts that do not abate.</p><p>She stalks to the window, glaring into the dying light. Paces the confines of her room. Methodically checks that all her letters have been burned, destroying any evidence of her correspondence. Lights her candle when the light disappears entirely. Folds herself into the sheets of her bed.</p><p>Nothing.</p><p>Time slows to an agonizing crawl, delineated by her breaths that never grow even enough for actual peace.</p><p>Wax pools at her candle’s base, the interminable night at its end, even if she’d had to survive it twice.</p><p>She rises, gathering her belongings directly this time. Eager for an early start after being put off for so long. She’s walking down the last of the dormitory’s steps—expecting the monastery’s bells to sound with the dawn at any moment when it happens.</p><p>Again.</p><p>Impossibly.</p><p>Ferdinand sits across from her, their meal neglected as dusk brashly rings out.</p><p>She can hardly move, waylaid by suspicion and at the mercy of some force working upon her.</p><p>She considers Ferdinand when it’s her turn to speak once more. Nearly asks him if he’s noticed anything wrong, but he’s just the same with nothing greater preying on his mind. His affront an act of righteousness against only Hubert and herself.</p><p>Hubert. The one person she could openly talk this through with, and he is gone at her behest.</p><p>It may still be a dream, she allows herself to contemplate, but the level of clear and minute details—the exact students passing by in the exact same sequence, the same conversations that color the room. The same cool breeze that reaches her face, the smell of her saghert and cream, the sweet tang as she forces down a morsel.</p><p>Nauseous, she puts down her fork. Clenches her hand so hard that she can feel the bite of her nails, even through her gloves. Focuses on each pressure point against her palm. Runs her finger along the length of the fork, picks it up again, feeling out its weight, reaching for words to describe it. Curved, slight, dull, dented. Argent perhaps. No, slate gray.</p><p>An old trick learned long ago.</p><p>“Edelgard,” Ferdinand says, his expression clouded. “Is all well?”</p><p>That, at least, is new. She snaps to attention, the possibility of change within reach.</p><p>“Of course,” she says, more a promise to herself.</p><p>But it is a test to uphold it when they only end up back at their dinner for a fourth time, Ferdinand none the wiser. No longer can she deny the situation; some force is working upon her.</p><p>Anger, familiar and dependable, takes hold, directed first at herself. It is not like her to play the easy victim without taking any course of action. She does not know of any recourse, but she does have her suspicions, growing ever more foreboding.</p><p>The Church that has held all of society in place for far too long. Or those with whom she works reluctantly, their order having held her captive once already.</p><p>For all that she stands on Church soil, her suspicions do not stray there first, Rhea’s machinations usually more open, sanctimonious affairs. But some power previously unknown, able to trap someone in a pocket of time—if that is what has happened to her?</p><p>She does not fully understand those she and Hubert call Those Who Slither in the Dark and maybe this is the price she has to pay for that ignorance. For being willing to partner with them, no matter the terms.</p><p>Only, what would be the point of such an attack with them eager for Edelgard to wage her war against the Church of Seiros? To merely play with her? Mold her into a more compliant pawn?</p><p>Again, she wishes for Hubert, hoping to talk through her theories. If he has been able to keep to his schedule, she expects him to be near Hevring territory. Too far to hope to reach before the day may repeat, even with a warp spell or several.</p><p>That is, if leaving the monastery’s grounds doesn’t break the night’s hold on its own.</p><p>She makes it as far as the foothills of the Oghma Mountains, trouncing days-old snow underfoot and staggering across the uneven terrain. The clouds capture the moon’s light, and she reaches Adrestian territory proper in an unseen tangle of undergrowth, bramble tearing through her gloves and leggings until her marred skin is exposed in long, angry lashes.</p><p>In stillness she lies there, her breath misting in the cold. She watches the stars as they watch her back, trying to recover and seething at their tranquil indifference.</p><p>The sun though is just on the verge of rising. She can feel it as birds begin to shake off their sleep, singing to one another. The first dusting of snow begins to fall, catching on her eyelashes, and she holds her breath—hopeful.</p><p>It knocks out of her as she sits back across from Ferdinand, the din of the dining hall grating her senses.</p><p>She stomps down the first hint of despair, assessing herself. She is not overly tired, neither from the distance she’s traveled nor as she should be after nights on end without sleep. The scratches, too, are gone from her body. An important thing to note.</p><p>There may be no telling the mental trauma of this experience, but at least her body seemed to be exempt from it. Her hands grip her knees at the thought. Hubert might have even laughed at that sentiment, were he here to hear it.</p><p>She decides to attempt an escape again, not just towards Hubert but in any given direction. As if she may still outrun whatever has ensnared her, if only she goes far enough.</p><p>The only place she ends up is right back at the dining hall, dusk at hand.</p><p>She retreats to her room once more, thinking through all her contact with her uncle and his subordinates. Whether or not they could be working upon her directly. Her uncle is back in Enbarr, any message undeliverable under the constraints of the time she has to work within. The location of those he keeps lurking in the shadows—largely nameless to her still—she does not know.</p><p>She had believed them to have been pulled back after the incident with Kronya and Solon, but given the circumstances it may very well be otherwise. She rallies herself, roving about the monastery’s perimeter and then through the village on its outskirts, searching for some answer or sign of a responsible party. All she encounters is a group of bandits, off near the village. Picking them off accomplishes nothing except to drain her further.</p><p>Ferdinand is too bright by comparison, even displeased at her.</p><p>“I must confess, I did not expect my words to cut so deep,” he says, looking upon her.</p><p>She scoffs, regaining her full height, and turns to her immediate surroundings instead, deciding in half-frustration that the solution could be closer at hand. Methodical, she combs over the monastery she knows so well, its advantages and weaknesses as a battlefield already scoped out for a future assault. Now the line of attack is less obvious, and she only looks to see if anything is amiss. If she can’t root out anyone suspicious.</p><p>Knights and monks are scattered among more familiar faces. Raphael, Ingrid, and Sylvain in the dining hall as well. Ashe and Caspar haggling at the marketplace, Lorenz in the entrance hall. Petra at the pier, Marianne at the stables. Flayn in the courtyard, Dorothea out on the bridge. Mercedes, Dimitri, and Dedue in the cathedral. Felix and Leonie at the training grounds, Ignatz on a balustrade. Lysithea and Annette in the classrooms, Cyril by the greenhouse. Rhea in her audience chamber, Seteth in the advisory room. Claude in the library, Manuela in the infirmary, and Hanneman in his study. Linhardt, Bernadetta, Hilda, and Byleth all in their rooms.</p><p>She walks the area covertly in the same order, at the same time, watching for any aberration. Until, finally, she spots one on her fifth day of rounds—Claude chatting to monastery staff as she cuts through the courtyard.</p><p>Not as loud or boisterous as Edelgard has sometimes seen him to be, but a little more subdued, breezy and congenial.</p><p>She comes to a halt, sinking back into the hedges. Claude keeps to the library. She’s certain of that, his figure unmistakable even with it half obscured by the pillar he hides behind. She has not tracked his progress later in the day, but she’s cut down this exact path at this exact time and never seen him before.</p><p>She does not believe he’d taken notice of her earlier, peering into the library, but he does not miss her now. He looks up and meets her eye. His animated face expressionless.</p><p>A moment elapses, then two. She’s not sure how long she stands there, but Claude allows himself to be drawn back into conversation, his eyes leaving hers. She strides on, putting distance between them, her mind at work to piece together the situation she’s stumbled onto. No. She needs another test, another confirmation—</p><p>It comes the next day when Claude is not in the library. She checks every corner, every alcove. No trace of him to be found, apprehension and disquiet cutting through her.</p><p>Edelgard considers herself a good judge of character—a crucial skill she’s had to stake her life on. That does not mean she has an easy time of connecting with others or empathizing with differences in perspective, but a person’s nature and motivations she can usually discern.</p><p>Claude, however, eludes her. He comes across as more of a nuisance than a threat, but she does not know enough about him or his past to guess where his allegiances or thoughts truly lie. And that alone makes him dangerous.</p><p>She breaks from her established route, hunting for him in the periphery of her vision. But though everyone else is where she expects them to be, she cannot pin down Claude.</p><p>It’s on her third pass of the reception hall that evening when there’s a tap on her shoulder.</p><p>She does not startle. Not truly. Just takes a delayed swipe at the air with her dagger, narrowly missing her chance to rid herself of the self-satisfied expression she meets.</p><p>“Claude,” she demands, voice only slightly modulating. “What are you doing here?”</p><p>What she wants to ask is how he snuck up on her so easily.</p><p>“Easy there,“ he says, throwing up his arms. “You looked like you were expecting someone to appear over your shoulder at any moment. And I thought, well, it’s not like I was doing anything else.”</p><p>She lowers her dagger, but keeps her grip tight. Poised to strike should the situation warrant it. “That’s hardly an answer.”</p><p>“Maybe not, but would you give me one if I asked you the same question?” He has the gall to lean in closer. Marginally, she raises the dagger again, a recent replacement for the one she’s lost. With careful precision she controls its less familiar weight.</p><p>He does not move away, seemingly unconcerned if not for the vein in his neck that stands so prominently at attention. It would make a perfect target.</p><p>His voice lowers, his throat bobbing. “The funny thing is, I could have sworn you weren’t at the monastery today. Hard to miss someone as striking as you.”</p><p>Unconsciously, her hand flexes around its weapon. “You must not have been looking very closely then.”</p><p>“Somehow I don’t think that’s the case.” His eyes flicker across her face before landing back on her own. “Say, princess, what’s got you so on edge?”</p><p>She does not drop his gaze, as intent as his stare is. “I’m not on edge, merely irritated.”</p><p>“Really? With this pointed at me?” he says, tapping the blunt edge of her blade. Stiffly, she draws her arm down, hiding her dagger away again, and he grins, pleased. “So tell me then. What could possibly affect your perfect composure? Is it the way the day’s been feeling so repetitive?”</p><p>Her pulse pounds, deafening. It is all but confirmation that he is aware of the night she is living through, but she will not play her hand so easily.</p><p>Her tone strives towards amusement. Just another senseless exchange passed between them. All normal. “An interesting but rather vague sentiment. You’ll have to elaborate.”</p><p>“Oh, I don’t know exactly,” he says, rocking back on his heels. “But I get the sense you have an idea already.”</p><p>She can feel the line that forms at the bridge of her nose, beyond any control. “As impossible as always, Claude. If you have something worth saying, then say it.”</p><p>“And here I was waiting for you to actually add something to the conversation.” He tilts his head at her, beseeching. “You know, it would be awfully good of you to let down your defenses long enough to share your own thoughts.”</p><p>With her dagger concealed, her words make up the difference. “If you were seeking to solicit my thoughts, perhaps you’d have done better than to try and sneak up on me.”</p><p>“Only try? Darn.” Claude laughs, and she very pointedly does not flush. “But point taken.” He dips at the waist, an actual bow, but there is no obeisance to the act. No real lowering of himself. “I hope you have a wonderful rest of your evening. Feel free to say hello yourself next time.”</p><p>Edelgard watches him go, sincerely wishing there will not be a next time.</p><p>Of course there is.</p><p>The very next dusk she spots Seteth on the dock, brow furled as he casts a line. Her first instinct is to check the second floor of the monastery to see what could have displaced him from his usual routine. Rhea is holding an open audience, per usual, no sign of disruption that could have affected her closest advisor. But Edelgard’s answer arrives soon enough when she throws open Seteth’s office.</p><p>There is Claude again, body splayed across the settee, legs thrown over its arm. The shelves are ransacked, books splayed open upon the table and floor and one across his chest. Reluctant, he glances up from it.</p><p>“Need something?”</p><p>Her eyes narrow. He does not even shift.</p><p>Rationally, it is unlikely he is the cause behind her current plight. He lacks the aptitude for even small acts of magic, let alone the kind that must be behind this endless night. At most, he can be complicit, but why trap himself as well?</p><p>Regardless, it does not change the fact that she cannot trust him.</p><p>“Of course you’d be behind it,” she accuses.</p><p>“Sorry,” he says more to his book than her. “I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re trying to give me credit for.”</p><p>“Don’t play the fool. It’s unbecoming.”</p><p>“Well.” He smiles, looking back up. “I’d never want to be unattractive to you. But it’s actually you who will have to elaborate this time.”</p><p>Her lips flatten into a taut line, more affected than she’d like. “Seteth’s sudden desire to spend the night fishing.”</p><p>“Huh.” Again, his eyes flick back down to his book. Lazily, he flips to a new page. “He must have heard about a rare fish sighting from someone.”</p><p>“And you the source, no doubt.”</p><p>“Who can say? But I’m sure he’s having a far more enjoyable night for it.”</p><p>She enters the room proper, moving straight for the towering stack of tomes he’s pulled. “And in his absence you decide to make yourself right at home. For what aim?”</p><p>“Oh, just some light reading. Seteth has quite the collection.”</p><p>“And what happens when it’s not just me who comes by next?”</p><p>His mouth curls up vexingly at the corner. “I think we both know no one else will be coming by. Unless you have reason to think otherwise…?”</p><p>Another testing of the waters on his part. A possible admission that he knows nothing more than her, but not quite.</p><p>She does another sweep of him and the disheveled sight he makes. She’s well aware of his broader reputation of being lax and nonchalant, and he fits both descriptions well enough. But she also knows of his late nights in the library, coming across him more than once in checking in with Solon. Can see the way he holds open his book, thumb lined up exactly where he’s left off.</p><p>Nothing about him ever seems to make complete sense, so full of contradiction.</p><p>“I didn’t realize my thoughts were of such paramount importance to you,” she says.</p><p>He huffs out a laugh, but she sees his eyes roll, too. Good. Let her get to him like he gets to her.</p><p>“Rest assured, I find your thoughts fascinating. But I promise I’d appreciate them even more if you actually dared to share them.”</p><p>“It’s a wonder you can get any reading done, the way you love to speak incessantly.” She pauses as soon as she’s said it, eyes running over the spines of the books nearest her. All on the early accounts of the Church and its foundational figures. Not surprising for Seteth to possess. But still.</p><p>She lays a hand across the top volume.</p><p>“Something catch your eye?” Claude asks, sitting up so suddenly he nearly jarrs her. Without warning, he leans over, peering closely. “Now that’s an interesting choice. Seteth personally confiscated that one right out of my hands, claiming it belonged to Tomas—Solon really. But here it now is, gracing his own shelves, kept far from us lowly students. Strange, that.”</p><p>Edelgard, reaching to crack open the old tome in question, halts momentarily at the mention of Solon. Pauses again when she doubts that Claude has missed her tell. He’s grinning at her again.</p><p>She compels herself back into motion as smoothly as she can, turning to the first page’s inscription—or where it should rightly be. With it missing, there’s no clue as to the scribe, who had ordered it into being, or its provenance in general. If it’s Solon’s, he would have never thought to share it with her.</p><p>“Whereas you’d propose returning it directly to the library’s shelves,” she says, picking back up the thread of their conversation as disinterestedly as she can manage. She is, in fact, quite interested in his reply.</p><p>“What can I say? I don’t believe in withholding information, even from incorrigible students like myself.”</p><p>“Careful, Claude,” she says, meeting his eye. “It’s almost as if you’re implying the Church practices censorship.”</p><p>It’s the wrong thing to say, the way another one of his pleased smiles completely overtakes his face. “You know, Solon was of that same opinion.”</p><p>This time she decidedly does not react. It cannot be provocation. There’s no possible way he could know. She’d been careful. Taken every possible precaution—</p><p>“Call it what you like,” he continues. “I’m just interested whenever it seems like someone may be hiding something.”</p><p>It’s only an attempt to circle back to her, she’s well aware, but it’s easy to ignore his intent when there’s a more engaging topic of conversation at hand.</p><p>“And what have you discovered?” she asks, even letting through a hint of genuine curiosity. “What do you think the Church is hiding?”</p><p>He waves his hand. “That’s an ongoing topic of discovery. I guess it’s almost a good thing I have an untold number of nights ahead of me.”</p><p>“So that’s what you plan to do?” she responds, voice lowering immediately in censure. “Just keep to your books and let this continue on?” It sounds too close to leisure, pleasure even—and the worst possible decision she could make facing down complete uncertainty. All on the eve of everything she’s worked and sacrificed for, no less. She cannot afford to even entertain the thought.</p><p>“Ah, so you’re finally willing to acknowledge our mutual little quandary.” He smiles to let her know he’s won an unspoken contest. She has to consciously work to clear her face of its answering frown, and the effort it requires only inspires another.</p><p>Claude watches her struggle for only a moment. “Very magnanimous of you,” he says, head dipping back down to resume his book with finality. “I look forward to seeing what you make of the night instead.”</p><p>She’s left just standing there, still holding onto a tome that begs to be paged through. Even if she already knows all the relevant damning facts when it comes to the Church—knows them viscerally, impossible to forget.</p><p>She drops the book down instead and steps out, back to staking out the monastery and its grounds for what becomes days on end. Starts always with a more immediate sweep, ensuring Rhea is in the same place and then Claude, who takes to flippantly waving at her whenever she throws Seteth’s office door open.</p><p>Each time, her strides carry her away faster from him, but there is no other party to consider; no one that turns up in any overlooked corner of the monastery at any given hour of the night.</p><p>When she cannot stand the roving any longer, she reminds herself of what she does everything for, sitting down at her desk as she writes out her future plans and the past that drives her.</p><p>One line for each of her family members now gone.</p><p>One line for every year she knows she’s lost to the harm inflicted upon her and then leaves a gaping blank space for the years she may yet lose.</p><p>She crumples the paper in a fit of restless anger. Burns it in the palm of her hand, so hot she nearly sears her skin through her glove.</p><p>What she needs is a greater course of action, and the next dusk she heads for the Sealed Forest to see if there’s some remnant of magic, Solon’s or otherwise, that she can detect. Some explanation of the night’s hold over her.</p><p>It is a mistake.</p><p>She can tell almost immediately, more than one Demonic Beast already back on the prowl and her with no support. From the treeline one darts, catching her unaware. She nearly screams as it sends her crashing into the ground, something snapping in her arm.</p><p>Broken, she’s certain. It does not hang right, at least, as she makes her escape, wielding her axe one-handed.</p><p>She never makes it as far as the monastery. Someone else is moving along its outskirts—Claude, she realizes, his head lifted skyward.</p><p>She grits her teeth, patting herself down and shaking dirt and debris from her clothes. Leads with her good side as she approaches, holding back her broken arm. She finds her voice.</p><p>“What are you up to now?” she demands, firm and unwavering.</p><p>He’s the one who startles this time, only to do another double take at the sight of her. So she did not do as good a job as she’d hoped in presenting herself.</p><p>“Hey, are you okay?” he calls, softer than she’d expect, making his way to her.</p><p>“There’s no need to concern yourself with me. Nothing is wrong.”</p><p>He’s close enough now to be within reach, and he extends his hand towards her. “Even your arm?”</p><p>She shifts further to the side, shielding it from him. “It’s fine.”</p><p>“We can get you to the infirmary.” At her glare he pivots. “How about Linhardt? Or I can try Marianne...”</p><p>“It’ll take care of itself, soon enough. Now how about you actually answer my question? Are you tired of Seteth’s collection already?”</p><p>His hand still lingers near her, rising abruptly to her face. The bow of his mouth pulls in concentration, fingers untangling leaves and twigs from her hair as she stands there, overtaken by the proximity and touch. Far too slow for her own liking, she knocks his arm away. Brusquely sweeps a hand over her head and knocks loose what he’s missed.</p><p>When he speaks it is nonchalant, as if he’s done nothing at all to set her off balance. “Just taking a bit of a break to get some needed perspective.”</p><p>“By getting lost in the stars?” she counters, all the sharper for being flustered still, her face running hot in the cold air.</p><p>“Why not? Good to remember the vastness of the universe. Makes you think we’re really just insignificant mortals.”</p><p>“Insignificant mortals?” she echoes. She cannot keep the scowl off her face anymore than she can modulate her voice. “So is that it? You think we’re just at the mercy of some higher power working upon us? Like the goddess?”</p><p>He holds up his hands, laughing. “Wow, such contempt. Who said anything about the goddess? But there’s still the possibility there are forces we may not be aware of. Ones even greater than us.”</p><p>His eyes sweep across the firmament, then fall back to her face. “Who knows, maybe this situation has some precedent elsewhere or even stranger ones. How are you meant to find any answers if you don’t hold some wonder and reverence for the world at large?”</p><p>Her jaw clenches, her own stare unyielding. “Nothing comes of looking to the heavens for reassurance. It’s up to you to find and make answers by your own power. That’s the only way to live a life of your own.”</p><p>For a long time he says nothing, merely considering her as her impatience grows. Even the night begins to feel restless, the air stirring.</p><p>“Has anyone ever told you,” he finally speaks, words carried by the wind, “that you come across as pretty narrow-minded?”</p><p>Her composure breaks entirely. This is the last conversation she wishes to have with him: a cross-examination of her supposed faults when he is idling his nights away, head lost in the clouds.</p><p>“On the contrary,” she retaliates, “I’m simply focused on what is real and present. I don’t let myself get distracted by pointless philosophizing.”</p><p>“Well.” He smiles, almost indulgent, like he’s in on some joke at her expense. “I still hope I was a bit of a distraction from your painful-looking dilemma. Until next time.”</p><p>Too late, she realizes that the night is at another end, the snow already falling. She blinks and she’s back in the dining hall with Ferdinand to contend with once more.</p><p>Edelgard rises abruptly, Ferdinand gaping at her touch of dramatics. She tests her previously injured arm by shoveling a forkful of saghert and cream in her mouth. No harm, she finds, but she chases the sweetness with bitter feeling as she marches away.</p><p>She only has to go as far as the courtyard to catch sight of Claude, coming out of the monastery’s main building. He pauses just long enough to take her in and has the audacity to wink before ducking back inside.</p><p>Standing there, other students blithely passing her by in conversation, her frustration comes to a head, leaving her breathless. She takes back to her rounds with a vengeance, heading right back to the Sealed Forest, and she suffers two more nights that leave her bloody and all but defeated, collapsed just on the edge of the wooded enclosure.</p><p>She sits with the pain, using it to ground her and take stock of where she stands in time. How many days over by now should she have been emperor? How many since she should have made her way to the Holy Tomb, securing its power for herself and in turn dealing a crushing blow to the Church? A perfectly calculated and serendipitous start to her reign and war. Not living this aimless night, trapped and helpless. Almost as if she is back beneath the palace and—</p><p>She tenses, dispelling the thought. Power. That is what she needs, more than anything. Some means to wrest back control of her own life.</p><p>It’s at the entrance to the Holy Tomb that she ends up, knowing well the power it holds, and spends an infuriating night on accomplishing absolutely nothing. No closer to finding her own way in, regardless of the Crest of Seiros and the Crest of Flames she bears.</p><p>She returns to her room as the dawn nears, intent on at least mapping out and refining her plans for her strike at month’s end, whenever she might reach it.</p><p>Instead, she glances to the window to see if the night is beginning to slacken and is arrested by the sight of two of her books standing out of order in each other’s place. So small a detail she might not have noticed it if not for the fact that she’s returned to this room in the exact same state countless times.</p><p>She turns sharply, looking for any other sign of trespass or anyone still lurking. One face comes to mind immediately, smirking at her, but when she glances out her window and stalks down the hall to his room, she finds no trace of him.</p><p>Over and over again she examines the single discrepancy, wondering if she’s not losing herself in paranoid imaginings, but when the night ends and she cuts back directly to her room at dusk, it’s to find that the books are back where she expects them to be.</p><p>Back on the second floor of the monastery, Seteth’s study is now empty, and her heart rate picks up momentarily until she tracks Claude down across the hall.</p><p>“So now you’re rifling through the Captain’s Quarters?” she calls out from the doorway.</p><p>His arm freezes, fingers latched onto a slim book he’s in the process of pulling off the shelf. But when he glances over his shoulder at her it’s with just the smirk she’d imagined him wearing. “Snooping?” he says. “No, just edifying my mind.”</p><p>“So that’s what you were doing,” she rebukes, “breaking into my room.”</p><p>“Now why would you ever say a thing like that?” he says, barely even trying for the pretense of innocence.</p><p>It’s a ploy, she realizes, as her eyes hone in on the spine of the book that he’s nudging back into the bookshelf, the movement so small it’s almost beyond detection.</p><p>But perceive it she does, using it to her advantage. “Did you really think I wouldn’t notice you reading my bound set of Farvald’s Adrestrian Geopolitical Theory?”</p><p>“There’s a set?” He asks aloud. “I’ve only seen the one.” He flashes his teeth like an afterthought. “Elsewhere, of course.”</p><p>She is quite close to smirking herself. Her tone at least is warmly self-satisfied. “You’re correct, actually. There is just the one. But how could you have seen it when mine is the only copy left?”</p><p>The book is securely back on the shelf now and he turns to give her his full undivided attention, smiling without a hint of repentance. “Playing tricks on me now? I like this side of you. In any case, don’t bother troubling your lovely mind. You’re just as much of an enigma as you were before. You hide your secrets well.”</p><p>She crosses directly towards him. “Unlike Jeralt?”</p><p>He does not budge from his spot, but it is a near thing, his eyebrows raising as she encroaches his space before the bookshelf. His eyes shift to look between hers and she holds the gaze as her hand slips over his shoulder and pulls the same book free that he’s worked to conceal.</p><p>Incredulous, she pages it open. “His diary? Has anyone ever told you,” she says significantly, throwing his words back at him, “that you have a complete disregard for others’ boundaries? You were not entitled to go through my room, let alone to be reading this.”</p><p>“So you’re not curious at all? Even when it comes to what he has to say about Teach?” It’s a compelling opening argument, but he instantly loses all the ground he’s gained by what he follows it up with, “I know you and Dimitri have been smitten. Taken in by their power and guileless intrigue, mm? You must still be smarting that they chose Dimitri over you.”</p><p>“Whatever the Professor’s virtues may be is not the point,” Edelgard says severely. “Their father is barely dead and you’re paging through his personal belongings. You’re shameless.”</p><p>“Taking the high ground? Or just unwilling to agree with me on anything?” He gestures to the diary she holds tight to her chest. “Where do you plan on taking that?”</p><p>“Away from you perhaps.”</p><p>“Oh, so you can read it in secret? Should I spoil it for you to save you the trouble? I’ve already read it backwards and forwards, trying to make sense of it. I’m at the point where maybe I’d even bother Teach about it... but honestly, they’re a little shockingly clueless at times.” A grin steals across his face. “I have no idea what the Blue Lions are actually learning outside of some specific battle technique and strategy.”</p><p>Edelgard bites down an unexpected laugh, and it only encourages him, his grin growing. “Makes you feel a little better about not having them on your side, doesn’t it?”</p><p>“Battle strategy that bested both of us on more than one occasion,” she points out in reluctant fairness. “But you’re not wrong. I’ve looked at their assignments, and logically, they make little sense.”</p><p>Claude’s answering laugh is enough to sober her. She did not come to make sport, as amusing as the conversation is. She eyes the diary still in her hands. “And where has all this reading and idle wondering gotten you? No closer to ending this night, I’m sure.”</p><p>He frowns, a touch of more authentic emotion coming through in comparison to his easy laughter. In frustration he runs his hands through his hair. “There’s just so many loose threads here to keep track of and unravel...”</p><p>“How many times have we relived the same night already?” She all but shoves the diary back at him, and he takes a step back into the bookshelf from the force of the movement. “Have at it if you will. I have better things to do.”</p><p>But even she must admit that it is more desperation than conviction that returns her to the Sealed Forest, seeing her through its entire perimeter. Through a series of nights she learns how to maneuver around the Demonic Beasts that prowl the area. To even stun a few on her own, but it is a venture that ultimately offers up no clarity for why the night will not end.</p><p>Perhaps it’s for an actual lack of anything better to devote herself. Maybe it’s just the wide grin that Claude infuriatingly sends her way every time they cross paths, inquiring after her busy nights. The impossibility that she could be stuck with him of all people and that she still does not know his intentions.</p><p>Whatever the reason, it's enough to convince herself that she's being prudent when she decisively climbs up to the dormitory's second floor, past her own room and on to Claude’s.</p><p>She doesn’t try for subtlety, just breaks the door straight in and heaves it back into its frame behind her.</p><p>“What are you hiding?” she asks the room at large and starts at his desk, thumbing through the papers there. Countless times she gets caught up in discerning their scrawled handwriting only for them to reveal nothing of interest. With a frustrated huff she finally moves on, realizing just how far the night has advanced as she’s tried to play interpreter. She instead turns to the books thrown haphazardly across the room.</p><p>The door swings forward with a sound of protest, as damaged as she’d left it, and there in the opening stands Claude. Unashamed, she holds her ground.</p><p>“I was wondering if you might end up here eventually,” Claude says, equally unfazed. “Did you find what you were looking for?”</p><p>“Your room is a disgrace,” she pronounces, picking a final book up off the floor. When she discovers the crumbs across its pages she cannot resist shaking a few off in his direction.</p><p>His mouth quirks up. “So that’s a no then.”</p><p>“More like you live in complete disarray and keep nothing of worth." She eyes the object in the corner of the room and crosses towards it. Some kind of chalice maybe, standing upon a decorative pillow. "Except maybe for this. Care to tell me about it?"</p><p>"Oh that’s a gift,” he says slowly. “A kind of foreign ware. You know how Leicester merchants have their ways, whatever the political climate."</p><p>He purposefully draws out the explanation, long enough to make her scowl back. "And you choose to keep it here? It must mean something to you."</p><p>"I do have a bit of an interest in the outside world," he says. Diverted or exasperated, she cannot quite tell. Perhaps both.</p><p>"Do you? Maybe that would explain your rather elementary reading on Fódlan.” She gestures at the books across his bed. “Adrestian geography? Faerghese children’s myths? This is where the Leicester Alliance’s heir is at in his studies of larger Fódlan? Whom I’m meant to work alongside and trust with the Alliance? No wonder you were such a contentious pick.”</p><p>His good humor all but fades from his face. A clear sign she’s gotten to him again; a small victory she will take.</p><p>When Claude responds it is in Derdriu’s dialect, his enunciation perfect. “Your trust has nothing to do with it. It’s for the Alliance to decide, not you.”</p><p>“If it was,” she says, switching over from common Fódlani herself, “I can assure you that you would not be my choice.”</p><p>His look is rueful. “So you have a better candidate? I’m all ears, really.”</p><p>It can be none other than herself, at least in the immediate. There is no one else she could trust with the task of seeing to Fódlan’s future and the change that must stretch across it.</p><p>Claude is a distraction—a good and even successful one—but nothing more in relation to her aims.</p><p>And though he seems amenable to study, he remains fundamentally clueless and ill-equipped to meet even the present moment. It will fall to her as things always do.</p><p>She walks directly towards him, stopping just short to reach past him to the door. Forces it open and wrong-foots him all at once. “I’ll be sure to let you know in due course.”</p><p>“You just have all the answers, don’t you?” he calls out after her into the hallway, and she quickens her step in anger.</p><p>No, she does not. Not now, at least, and they both know it. Once more, she throws herself back into the monastery’s surroundings, thinking she might have missed some tell or threat. She clears its entire perimeter, pushing forward in every conceivable direction, and still she comes back empty handed.</p><p>The night begins to recede, but only in mind. She fights for consciousness instead, focusing on the cold, feeling each sting of the night breeze, running her fingers up and down her arms.</p><p>She needs perspective. To focus on what she can actively control, once this day ends. Back at her desk she lists out her immediate plans and maneuvers, lest the details escape her. Pushes down so hard on her quill that the tip bends as she reaches through the chasm of her mind—what she can remember and who she does everything for.</p><p>In quick succession she writes out her siblings’ names. She’s already forgotten so much, but the names—the names at least she will not forget.</p><p>Ricmod, Berengar, Herleva, Gerhild, Adalwin, Jordanes, Ragna, Gaufrid, Ulrich, Warin.</p><p>The quill’s nub snaps, a smear of ink swelling against the page and her hand. It drips off her desk, onto her clothes, clotting like blood.</p><p>She does not cry. She would not. Not in despair nor in frustration. She’s endured worse than a broken quill and a stain that will not even keep.</p><p>She stands so forcefully that her chair tumbles back across the floor. Leaves it there as she stalks back into the night, needing to do something, as much as there is no clear something to do. Nothing that will produce the desired effect of releasing her from this waking nightmare.</p><p>How can she be so close to her aims only to be deadlocked? Here, under the perpetual thumb of the Church, no matter what she does. One night fading into the next, time rendered meaningless. No change. Powerless—just as when she’d been held captive.</p><p>Again, her mind makes to pull away as it had done then, sparing her the turmoil. It has never been as tempting an escape since, but at the next dusk it’s emotion she reaches for, staring down the enemy she’s kept close for so long now.</p><p>If nothing else, she still has her anger to ground and propel her.</p><p>Rhea keeps to the same routine she does on any other version of this night, listening raptly to the same complaints that the same parishioners have to make. Serene and seemingly benevolent, but Edelgard knows better. Could almost sketch the outline of what her true form must look like, her hand tightening into a fist.</p><p>Faintly, the air stirs in the corridor behind her. She turns, catching a flicker of yellow before it disappears. Without hesitation she follows it up to the third floor, forbidden as it is to students.</p><p>That restriction has never stopped her before. Of course it would not stop Claude, either.</p><p>“And here I thought you were too busy glowering at Rhea to notice me passing you by,” he says over his shoulder, not bothering to slow and face her. “Some bad blood there? You know what they say. It’s a good idea to get things off your chest, and I’m more than willing to listen.”</p><p>“Deflecting as usual, I see,” she says coolly. “What are you after now?”</p><p>She wishes to take the question back as soon as he comes to a halt in front of the Archbishop’s room, the answer so glaringly obvious. “Something even you may be tempted by. What do you say, should we strike an alliance? If there's anyone with more secrets than the two of us it has to be Rhea.”</p><p>Edelgard knows them all and still, the thought of disturbing the order of Rhea’s room has an undeniable appeal. She levels him with a look. “Whatever alliance we strike does not extend beyond tonight.”</p><p>Claude laughs, pulling out a lockpick behind his back. “That might be a long time yet,” he says and is successful with both unlocking the door and taking apart its hinges. But even dismantled, the door does not give, a force keeping them out.</p><p>Edelgard can see the need for her now. She shoulders up next to him, tracing a hand over the Faith based seal. She’s seen similar ones around the monastery, and she’s always dissipated them by Reason alone, so long as she can pinpoint the structure of the seal and its weaker focal points. This one, though, is more of a puzzle to decipher and it takes her longer than she’d like, all too aware of Claude at her side.</p><p>She keeps expecting an uninspired comment from him until she finally glances over and sees his intent expression. “What’s the matter?” he says quietly. “Can I be of help?”</p><p>“Unlikely,” she rejoins. “It’s not as though you’re any good at Reason or Faith.”</p><p>“Too true,” he says and steps away to allow her the chance to properly focus. Finally, the door groans open, gaping like a mouth missing its teeth.</p><p>“Nicely done,” Claude says, briefly clasping her shoulder as he darts past her into the room.</p><p>Shaking off the lingering feeling of his hand, she glares after him. “What are you looking for?” she asks as he pulls a full section from the bookshelf. He drops the staggering tower of books down to the floor, settling in beside it.</p><p>“Anything interesting really.”</p><p>She has to scoff. “All this time spent looking into things and you don’t even know what you’re after?”</p><p>“Maybe you’d prefer to tell me then,” he says as she begins to browse through the books he hasn’t gotten to yet. “Why do you dislike Rhea so much?”</p><p>She keeps her gaze trained on the bookshelf before her. “I never said I did.”</p><p>He puts a book aside, moving on to the next. When he glances up at her, she can just see his smirk. “So you decided to join me just for fun? If looks could kill I’d wager that Rhea would already be dead tonight.”</p><p>Her tone adopts a certain wryness. “Is that what you think? If anyone is liable to die tonight it is us and by Rhea’s hand. I doubt she’ll take lightly to trespassers.”</p><p>He laughs outright at that, and she suppresses her own amused smile.</p><p>His diversion is just as short lived. “Better get to it then,” he says and promptly loses himself in the books splayed out before him.</p><p>The quiet is unnerving for a moment before she returns to studying the collection herself. Most of the books are frail, showing their age. Centered around the Saints and their feats and miracles. Foundational theology revolving around the goddess. Parables of the good piety of the populace and the ways they were rewarded for their faith. Accounts of the Church’s carefully rewritten history between Seiros and the Ten Elites. Veneration of the Adrestia’s founding and the partnership between Wilhelm I and Seiros.</p><p>Of course Rhea would only keep items that propped up her own narrative. Out of cautiousness, perhaps, but easier to believe in your righteousness when you held on to nothing that could call it into doubt.</p><p>“What's got you looking so smug?” Claude cuts in, crouching over the book she holds open. His lips twist downward. “There’s nothing noteworthy here, at least at first glance.” He leans back, holding his temple in thought. “Well, some of these saintly accounts seem unique and I’d like to pick apart the miracles they claim, but otherwise Rhea’s collection is a complete disappointment. Seteth’s is more interesting by far.”</p><p>She cannot help inciting him. “Did you truly expect one of her books to hold all the answers you seek?”</p><p>“Some new insight at least,” he says with surprising despondency. His frown sweeps every corner of the room and then meets hers. Slowly, his face clears, his head tilting in consideration. “I guess there’s no helping it.”</p><p>Her eyes narrow. “What now?”</p><p>“If subterfuge won’t work, maybe I should take a page out of your book and try a more direct approach.”</p><p>If he expects her to be flattered, she is not. She only grows more suspicious. “How exactly?”</p><p>He does not answer but instead moves abruptly to the window. Then turns, glancing over her shoulder. For the hall he bolts, grabbing at her arm and lifting her onto her feet. “Come on, it’s about time Rhea starts to make her way back.”</p><p>She only throws off his hold out on the Star Terrace. “What’s the point in running if you’re going to leave the room in that state?”</p><p>“With the seal broken, she’d know either way.” He winks at her, moving to the end of the terrace, throwing one leg over its ledge. “But I’d rather not stick around and see if she really would kill us.”</p><p>She strides after him by instinct, leaning over the roof’s edge to track Claude’s progress as he scales his way down. “And I’m to understand this is your idea of a direct approach?”</p><p>“No.” He grins up at her. “That’s for tomorrow. Now are you coming or are you afraid of heights? I’ve noticed you’re not much for flying units.”</p><p>“Afraid is the last thing I am.” But even she is annoyed by how haughty she sounds. How can he affect her so easily still? Surely she should be immune to his antics by now.</p><p>“Sure you aren’t,” he says, dismissive, and it’s in an act of pride that she follows after him, carefully picking her way down.</p><p>“Fine form,” he laughs quietly as she dangles from one handhold to the next, finding her way with caution.</p><p>She hits the ground heavily but precisely, and counters, “Don’t think I missed you tripping over yourself when you landed.” The words barely reach him, Claude already moving away, and belatedly she realizes that he was only waiting on her to make it down as well.</p><p>“Best to head back to where we’re actually expected to be for the rest of the night,” he calls, headed for the dormitories. “I think there’ll be a bit of storm.”</p><p>Of that, Edelgard is certain, searching through the darkness for any sign of trouble as they furtively cross the grounds.</p><p>They make it without incident, but by the time they’re slipping down the dormitory’s second floor’s hallway, Edelgard is already restless. She catches a last glimpse of Claude as he disappears further down the hall and then she is alone, left to endure the night’s remaining hours while confined to her room.</p><p>She spends them laid low at her window, like a prisoner afforded one small view of the outside world. By only the light of the moon she identifies Rhea’s guards as they pass. Spies the glint of their armor and weaponry, and her hands ache for a weapon of their own. She pulls her dagger free, turning it over and over in the palm of her hand. Armed, but just as trapped as ever.</p><p>The night ends at last. The sun returns, only to die off again.</p><p>The shadows stretch long and grasping in the dwindling light, Claude’s own snaking out towards her when she sees him next. Outside Rhea’s audience chamber he stands, lost in thought and noticeably empty-handed.</p><p>“What is this grand plan of yours?” she asks.</p><p>If he is surprised to find her there, he does not show it. He only shakes his head and puts on one of his pretend smiles. “Simple. I get her to talk.”</p><p>She eyes him again and the area at large. “By what means?”</p><p>“Like I said, a direct approach. The pure and simple ingenuity of conversation.” He splays his hands wide. “No schemes from me. This time.”</p><p>“Do you really think you’ll be able to just talk her into revealing anything she may be hiding?”</p><p>He hums, rolling out his neck and shoulders and loosening up his muscles. It is a completely absurd display for a mere confrontation of words.</p><p>“It’s worth a shot at least,” he says. “There’s no need to hold back, the way things are. I might as well as go for the jugular.”</p><p>He rubs his hands together, stepping forward without waiting on her approval. She would not have given it to him even if he had, but still she watches as he taps the parishioner speaking with the archbishop on the shoulder, smoothly interceding.</p><p>“Sorry, some pressing business,” he says, the sound carrying just far enough.</p><p>Rhea’s face goes carefully expressionless. “And what business would that be?”</p><p>“Just a few things that I think I’ve waited long enough to speak with you about. Starting with the operation you’ve been running here.”</p><p>Rhea’s voice is as melodious as ever, even as she turns him away. “Already it would seem this is not an urgent matter, after all. A meeting can be scheduled. Perhaps for tomorrow if you are so impatient.”</p><p>“Nope. Sorry, but it’s got to be right now.”</p><p>Edelgard draws nearer, the better to see the way Rhea’s face dips, eyes glinting in distaste. “If you have an issue with your experience as a part of the Officers Academy you may—”</p><p>“Not about that,” Claude says, waving his hand in her face, and Rhea’s countenance openly slides into one of contempt. “But we <em>could</em> start there, if you’d like. It all seems like a bit of a sham, starting from your admissions process and all the way to your exorbitant fees and qualification exams.”</p><p>“If you are here to level an accusation of profiteering, you’d do well to realize that the Church of Seiros requires certain funds to function independently of any one nation.” It is a firm answer, Rhea’s speech perfectly controlled, but the pieces of her headdress clatter, her frame subtly shaking.</p><p>“Yeah,” Claude drawls in stark counterpoint. “The upkeep of funding your own personal armed force really must dwindle the coffers. Though who knows why an impartial holy institution really needs one in the first place? Unless, of course, you’re not so hands off after all.”</p><p>Even his easy demeanor cannot soften the attack of his words, all the more biting for their accuracy—and not at all what Edelgard would have expected of him.</p><p>Already standing with perfect posture, Rhea somehow ascends to an even greater height to look down upon the room. “The Church merely seeks to protect our order and to lend our support when there are greater and malicious forces at work. People need looking after. Our mission above all else is to teach the Creed of Seiros and spread its uplifting and healing message which—”</p><p>“Uplifting? Healing?” Claude laughs, but it rings as hollow as the suits of armor that line the room, serving as stoic judges. Edelgard moves closer still, drawn to the conflict. Hanging upon whatever assault Claude may issue next. He obliges with vehemence.</p><p>“Your creed is literally founded on the principle of dividing and othering people. The kind of message that most encourages hateful action.”</p><p>They are not the words Edelgard herself would have reached for, but they infuriate Rhea all the same.</p><p>“I will not stand here and debate the merits of the Seiros faith with you. The Church of Seiros has welcomed and enriched you for the last year, and this is the gratitude you show?”</p><p>“Oh you think I should be grateful? For what? The way you indoctrinate future leaders of Fódlan into your fold? Have them carry out your work for you, starting with sending near children into battle under the Church of Seiros’s banner?” He shrugs. “I guess it’s just too bad the indoctrination doesn’t always work.”</p><p>How often has Edelgard seen the exact smirk he wears now? For the first time she understands its appeal. Is almost unable to look away—if not for Rhea’s careful and regal bearing falling to pieces.</p><p>Edelgard goes taut, poised against the threat she reads in the archbishop’s towering figure.</p><p>“This conversation has come to its end. If you are so dissatisfied by the instruction you are receiving, I am more than willing to facilitate your departure from our Officers Academy.”</p><p>Claude takes only a subtle step backward, seemingly unconcerned. His words, however, are unrelenting. “Aw, but we’ve only gotten to the things you make no attempt to conceal! I wanted to discuss why you don’t want us to know about crest stones and relics and the Immaculate One. About any early theological accounts, really. Why shouldn’t we be able to truly devote ourselves to your <em>compassionate</em> message?”</p><p>Edelgard’s pulse rouses at the words; Rhea actually bares her teeth, and there—there is the beast she pretends so hard not to be. A beast recognizing and staring down a real threat she means to slay. Her voice raises, reverberating off the walls. “Do not think you can just mock the Church or its tenets. I will not tolerate this insolence.”</p><p>“How about,” Claude persists, “you tell us the oh so benevolent thing you did to Byleth when they were born? Because Jeralt and even Seteth seem to think it was rather terrible.”</p><p>Unbidden, Edelgard’s eyes cut back to Claude, wondering where he’s gotten such incitement or information, and in the space of that moment Rhea takes a heavy step forward, surveying the room and its various onlookers. From the side room emerges Seteth, looking questioningly to Rhea.</p><p>She slips back on her last veneer of composure, but her voice is still lethal. “What malicious intent are you harboring, you impudent child? You will answer for your impertinence. Guards!”</p><p>Claude backs away again, hands raised and tracking those who stand at attention. “Not much respect for a future leader of Fódlan.”</p><p>“You’ve long overstepped any respect due to you. Need I remind you that you do not hold the authority here?” Rhea’s lip curls, venomous. “The monastery is the Church’s dominion and here you are subject to my grace or lack thereof.”</p><p>The words are far more than an attack on Claude, jarring Edelgard where she stands. The chamber, so vast, begins to contract as one guard moves past her, then another, and for one terrifying moment her body locks up with the feeling of being caught and powerless, here at Rhea’s mercy.</p><p>It was not meant to be like this. When she first came to Garreg Mach it was not to be pinned down or to cower. Her hand clenches, her feet shifting, the clarity and purpose of anger breaking through and releasing her.</p><p>Before her, Rhea brandishes her hand like an executioner.</p><p>There is only one way to stay a raving beast, and it is not with words.</p><p>Edelgard slips past the guards closing in. Momentarily turns her back on the rapidly devolving scene, Claude trying to talk the guards into standing down, Rhea ordering him to be delivered to her.</p><p>The closest suit of armor has all she needs, and she holds her spoil steady, gritting her teeth against its heft. She has to be quick, but it’s almost too easy to tear across the chamber, Claude still the focus of everyone’s attention.</p><p>Edelgard has already done her years of waiting. Does not hesitate, does not think. Just swings her arms back, her feet grounded, body strong and implacable, and the axe cuts clean through sinew and bone, cleaving Rhea’s head from her body in one stroke.</p><p>Time moves in fragmented motion.</p><p>Rhea’s head, expression still enraged, rolling across the floor.</p><p>Rhea’s head halting underneath the stained glass, unadorned except by her own blood.</p><p>The darker stains seeping into the tilework.</p><p>Edelgard cannot look away. Cannot look from the death she’s dreamt of for so long, come to fruition. A false child of god, slayed by her own hands. The pinnacle of what she was made to do.</p><p>If there is any hope to end this interminable night... the hold Rhea has over Edelgard—over them all—then this, surely—</p><p>Edelgard does not register she’s off balance, still tilted forward from the force of her swing, until she’s heaved backward by a guard. Her feet nearly leave the ground before she can plant them down again, rolling her assailant off her back.</p><p>But there’s another guard to offset the last, and then another, converging on her, restraining her arms before she can get a clear stroke of her axe, and then there’s a flash of silver—a lance run straight through her chest.</p><p>She gasps as the weapon is pulled back out, the open wound surging with blood. More blood, or maybe bile, rises in her throat, and she staggers, axe wrenched from her hands.</p><p>Her name reaches her from somewhere far away as the world fades and narrows. Claude, before her, angling to meet her gaze.</p><p>Her own eyes close and do not reopen. She crumples to the ground and she is gone—perhaps to know peace.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>
  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCZ2Dp6Is9M">To get this PARTY STARTED</a>
</p><p>Comments always appreciated as I work on fixing the rest of this up.</p><p>In the meantime, <a href="https://twitter.com/_onnari">you can catch me on twitter</a>.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Death is no release.</p><p>It claims her and then just as soon rejects her, thrusting her back into consciousness. Her senses all the more heightened for their brief absence, facing down the absolute nothingness she swears she’s met but still does not truly know.</p><p>The dining hall is too lively. It veers into incomprehension, Edelgard lost to the room’s ambiance of sound and aroma and movement. She recoils, but even that is a shock, her own body coming into sudden and searing focus. A foreign, onerous thing she must learn to repossess.</p><p>A ragged sound reaches her ears, and she realizes she is its source—drawing breath. She cannot capture it quickly or well enough, and then there is Ferdinand. Leaning over the table to speak to her.</p><p>“Edelgard, surely you are not well?” he asks, face distraught, and she struggles to piece together the words.</p><p>She struggles more for her response. She works her jaw. Pushes her lips apart. Breathes, then swallows. “Just fine,” she manages, but she may have never told a more obvious lie.</p><p>Ferdinand says something else, but she does not heed it. Unbidden, her eyes slip shut. Her hand moves slowly over her side, clutching around the wound that is no more except in feeling. She is healed, more or less, and she is alive. And if she is, then so must—</p><p>The sudden scraping of wood against the floor jars her. Then a thud as someone sits down and Ferdinand sputters, “Claude?”</p><p>Edelgard’s eyes open immediately. There, in fact, is Claude, forearms pressed against the table, eyes intent. All the more unnerving for holding his tongue for once. His gaze rests where her hand does, and she shifts it. Plants it down carefully on the table between them.</p><p>“Claude, you will excuse us,” Ferdinand interjects. “Edelgard does not seem to be in a condition for company now, and besides that we were already having our own—”</p><p>“You’re unharmed?” Claude cuts in, though his tone modulates. As if he, too, might be shaken.</p><p>“As you see,” she replies. “Rhea—”</p><p>“Like she never even lost her head last night.” He goes stiller, his gaze inescapable. “What the fuck, Edelgard?”</p><p>“I do not see the occasion that would warrant such strong language, Claude,” Ferdinand intercedes again, vaguely affronted. “Moreover, what is the meaning of this conversation?”</p><p>The interruption is a welcome one—a chance to better recover her faculty of speech—and in an attempt to keep their conversation more private, she even switches from common Fódlani back to his native Derdriu dialect. “You said you wished to go for the jugular. Well, I actually did.”</p><p>“That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” Claude responds readily in kind, voice taut.</p><p>Ferdinand makes his own, less adroit, attempt of the dialect. “I do not appreciate being... disregarded in this manner.”</p><p>Claude glances his way. “What are your thoughts then, Ferdinand? Edelgard has never been religious, wouldn’t you say? Never shows up to the cathedral for any service or Saints’ Days, at the very least.” His focus lands back on Edelgard, though his address is still to Ferdinand. “But would you also say she has some kind of vendetta against the Church’s highest member? That she wouldn’t hesitate to strike against it—or rather—Rhea?”</p><p>Just the thought of him mining others for information on her, even as unhelpful an informant as Ferdinand would likely be, is enough to make her seethe. The fact that Claude would dare to try it before her is only cause for further incensement.</p><p>“Ferdinand,” Edelgard says sharply, back to Fódlani. “Thank you for your company and concern.”</p><p>She does not get to finish the formality. Ferdinand stands up directly, distinctly peeved but maintaining his dignity. “I can tell when I’ve been dismissed, but this only goes to prove my point. You can rest assured I will make my case in full later on.”</p><p>She cannot entirely hold back a sigh. “Yes, I will be sure to hear it.” She is long past being able to quote it back to him.</p><p>It’s the conversation with Claude that remains an unknown, and she rounds on him as soon as Ferdinand is out of earshot, the better to control where it may lead. “Are you actually sorry that I did it? After all your cutting words yesterday?”</p><p>That part she is still processing, reconciling that he’d built up his own criticism of the Church. The Leicester Alliance harbored the least influential branch of the Church of Seiros, it was true, but its existence stood in stark contrast to the long-disbanded Southern Church in Adrestia. Edelgard only had to look at the other members of Claude’s house in comparison to her own to see how pervasive the Alliance’s faith still was. She can be sure she’s seen Claude attending at least a few services, even asking earnest questions of the Church's creed to monks around the monastery.</p><p>All an act? Merely seeking information to back his own agenda? Even now he remains so frustratingly hard to pin down, but the words he’d leveled against Rhea—could they really have been insincere? Edelgard cannot deny that they’d been enough to affect her in turn.</p><p>“Let’s just say Rhea has some things to answer for,” Claude says, not backing down in the slightest. “Ideally, she’d be alive long enough to give the answers.”</p><p>Edelgard leans in herself, fingers curling into fists upon the table. “So next you take her to tea? Talking will not work with Rhea. You’ve seen that for yourself now. If not for me, you’re the one who would have met with death last night.”</p><p>“Who’s to say I didn’t?” he asks. “You never asked what happened to me after you murdered the archbishop. Never really thought about it, did you?”</p><p>That does give her pause, looking him over. “No harm befell you,” she decides after a moment’s deliberation. He is too assured, too composed. Edelgard, meanwhile, is still not herself—still fighting off her brush with death and all its accompanying aftereffects.</p><p>He props his elbow up on the table, leaning his head into his hand. His mouth slants with one of his overdone smiles, his tone as jocular as ever. “No thanks to you. They tried their best to hold me accountable, really they did, but no luck. I have a knack for evading capture and defying death, you know.”</p><p>“If you are thinking to make any of this out to be just another joke or game—”</p><p>“Oh, I’m deathly serious, princess. And if you’d ever like to get serious with me...” His nonchalance quickly gives way, just a shallow ploy to incite her, and still she’d given him the satisfaction. “Answer all the questions I’d ask of Rhea,” he says. “Or do you know any of it, really?”</p><p>She is no fool. To give him any answer he seeks would only invite more questions—ones directed back at her and her possible source of information. “Do not expect me to compensate for your own ignorance,” she tells him instead. ”If you do not understand matters as they stand, you’d do better than to interfere in them.”</p><p>“Thanks for the advice,” he blithely dismisses. “Do you plan on following it yourself? Because I would still bet there are some secrets only Rhea knows, including about Teach.”</p><p>Her mouth tightens, remembering that particular accusation he’d brought up against Rhea, and he does not miss the tell.</p><p>“Thought that might catch your interest.” He drums his fingers on the table, ignoring her glare. “Though I doubt even she would know whether Byleth has anything to do with our current predicament.”</p><p>“Our current predicament?” Edelgard repeats, eyes narrowing. “How do you reason that?”</p><p>A light comes to his eyes, unexpected in its brightness. “You’re smart. Look at the simple facts of the matter.” He reaches to pilfer some of her saghert and cream, and it’s only the interest of his words that keeps her from stopping him. “There’s no denying that Teach is a complete unknown. No one seems to know exactly what to make of them—and that includes both Byleth themself or even Rhea, as much as she drags them into things.”</p><p>He makes a face at the dessert, wiping his hands clean. “A little too sweet for me. Is that what you like?”</p><p>“Proceed to the point,” she orders.</p><p>“As your greatness wishes.” He folds his arms, bearing his weight upon them, gaze steady. “What happened right before all this began but Byleth becoming one with the goddess and coming back from an apparent void in space and time? It would be stranger if all that weren’t somehow connected to what we’re going through.”</p><p>It’s the same event she’d been focused on, though approaching it from Solon’s side of things, not Byleth’s. Still, she does not give him the gratification of conceding. “And so? All you have is your unproven conjecture?”</p><p>“Everything’s conjecture until you try to prove it,” he says, and she doesn’t like the look he wears at all.</p><p>“And what does that entail now?”</p><p>He stands, voice pitched low. “Asking more of the questions no one else seems willing to.”</p><p>She’s on her feet without even fully intending it, following him out into the cold evening air. He has always been the more agile one between them, but now her body does not respond as it should, working with a delay or as if trudging through water. She frowns at his figure—at his cape waving tauntingly back at her—and doubles her pace, all the more vexed for how her body protests against the exertion.</p><p>Claude does not stop until he is at Byleth’s door, banging against it with full force. When she finally draws up beside him, she hisses, “Are you looking to draw the entire monastery’s attention?”</p><p>“Clearly this approach isn’t working anyway,” he says, flippant as he turns the corner and begins to climb the stone masonry that leads up near the sauna. Edelgard elects the stairs, but there is more scaling to be done to reach the walled enclosure behind the dormitories. When Edelgard drops down into the space, Claude is already throwing rocks through the ajar window that affords a clear view into Byleth’s room—its occupant sprawled hazardously across their bed and soundly passed out. The same as they always are each time Edelgard has swept through this corner of the monastery.</p><p>Unsuccessful still in getting Byleth’s attention, Claude jumps for the open window, his upper body balancing off its sill. “Hey Teach!” he shouts, banging on the window’s wooden slat and startling a bird from a nearby ledge.</p><p>“Would you cease that?” Edelgard says with a quiet intensity, but Claude does not let up this time, not until Byleth finally stirs. Arrested, they almost stumble to the floor, staring blearily up at Claude’s beaming face.</p><p>“Teach! Rest easy! It’s just us,” he says, all exaggerated innocence.</p><p>Claude drops back to the ground as Byleth takes up against the window themself, leaning heavily against its frame. “Claude?” They squint. “Yes? What is it?”</p><p>Again, he smiles, prefacing his casually disarming speech. “Just dropping in to check on you. See if everything’s well.”</p><p>“Well…” Byleth says, at a loss for words and finally stating the obvious, “I was sleeping.”</p><p>“Clearly,” Edelgard can’t help contributing. “I apologize for Claude’s rudeness and interference.”</p><p>Claude continues as if she’s said nothing at all. “You sure were. Almost seems like sleeping is all you do after that whole goddess incident in the Sealed Forest. Any strange dreams? Anything you’ve noticed that’s off?”</p><p>“Off?” Byleth’s hand subconsciously reaches for their nape, their fingers falling through the curling ends of their hair and its shocking shade of pale green. “I don’t think any of this is normal.”</p><p>“Too true,” Claude pushes on, “but more to the point. Any kind of strange… time-related things you want to tell us about?”</p><p>“Time...?” they say, something strange coming over them. A blunt look of nervous confusion as they dab at their hairline and the sheen of sweat that lingers there. “You mean—?”</p><p>Edelgard’s heart lurches. “Mean what? Time repeating itself?” she demands, more trenchant than she intends.</p><p>“So you know,” Byleth says, open mouthed. Their gaze turns inward. “But that was between Sothis and myself.”</p><p>Claude’s face goes slack as well. “Hold up. So you <em>are</em> keeping secrets? <em>You’re</em> responsible for this night repeating itself?”</p><p>“This night?” they blankly say. “What? No, I never use it outside of battle.”</p><p>“Use what?” Edelgard cuts back in, as forceful as she is frustrated by their collective inability to speak clearly.</p><p>“Reversing time,” Byleth answers quickly. “To prevent a bad outcome.” Their hand rises to their temple, nursing it against what looks to be a headache. In the pause that follows, they second guess themself. “So you didn’t know?”</p><p>Impossible. It should be impossible, even living out the larger impossibility of this night. Edelgard’s hands shake, and it is not from the cold or death’s grip.</p><p>A low peal of disjointed laughter sounds from Claude. One moment he is standing at her side and the next he is on the ground, head in his hands. “What is going on? I come here on the smallest chance you actually have something to share and now you’re telling us you’ve just been going around <em>reversing time</em>? How does that even <em>work</em>?”</p><p>Byleth’s brow furrows. “It’s—I’ve never tried to explain it. It’s more an instinct, after Sothis showed me how.”</p><p>Claude is still half-shocked, half-morose, but new life comes to him with another thought. “Wait, is that how your class always beats ours? How you always seem to know what strategy to use to win?”</p><p>The implication is enough to stall Edelgard’s breath. Facing down such a staggering advantage… What would be the point of ever raising a weapon in the first place?</p><p>Beyond them, a bird warbles in unbothered song. Byleth glances towards it, then the open expanse of the sky. The seconds pass them by.</p><p>“You don’t even have to say anything, that’s answer enough.” Claude dredges up another ghost of a laugh. “Well, I feel a little better for some close losses then. But that doesn’t help our ongoing problem.”</p><p>“What problem?” Byleth asks, eyes drifting back down upon them both. An undercurrent of tension makes its way through even their slumped posture. “What’s wrong now?”</p><p>“This evening,” Claude admits. “It keeps repeating. Countless times. Over and over and over again.”</p><p>“It’s not going back though?” Byleth says, a line forming between their brows. “Not for me, at least. I’m not… doing anything. And I can only do it so many times at once.”</p><p>Claude shakes his head. “I’m sorry, I still have so many questions. Is this just some kind of power of the goddess? Power over time?” His searching gaze lands on Edelgard. “Did I somehow miss that in a scripture somewhere?”</p><p>Edelgard unclenches her jaw enough against the unsettling thought to say, “I’ve never heard or seen any such thing. I would be disinclined to believe that Sothis’s powers could extend so far.”</p><p>Opposed, in fact, to believing anything being said. Sothis was not a deity, after all. Merely a false one, wrongly appointed. To control time in such a way—</p><p>“Well,” Claude says, at a loss, “all we have is Teach’s word. Unless…” He turns back to Byleth. “Could you do it right now? Turn back time?”</p><p>Byleth blinks. Blinks again, a stupor returning to them. “No?” They lean further against the window, eyes drifting shut, and murmur, “I must still be too tired. But it wouldn’t matter. You wouldn’t remember anyway.”</p><p>“Right. Sounds familiar.” Claude smiles, but it barely passes his mouth and goes no further. “There’s a good chance you won’t remember this conversation, either. But wouldn’t it be something if we all did?”</p><p> </p><p>***</p><p> </p><p>They do not; Byleth is just as lost as before, staring down at Claude and Edelgard at next sundown.</p><p>The conversation unfolds in a similar direction, if a little more smoothly, Claude leading with Byleth’s revelation and Edelgard seeing the pallor of truth overtake Byleth’s features. Claude is relentless in his own way, pressing Byleth for more information to see if there isn’t anything else that they are hiding—some understanding of events or Rhea’s actions. Byleth grows increasingly on edge, wondering back how Claude seems to know the suspect circumstances surrounding Byleth’s mother and birth. Something Edelgard also wonders for herself, hearing about them for the first time.</p><p>“I’ll admit I’ve been doing a little eavesdropping on Rhea,” Claude hedges with what is clearly not the full story, and Edelgard remembers Claude snooping in the Captain’s Quarters.</p><p>In the end, it makes no difference how many approaches or angles Claude tries, Byleth still professes to know nothing more than what they’ve already shared. When he finally admits defeat, he backs away, subdued in tone.</p><p>“Don’t—” Byleth calls out after him. For a moment they hesitate, then insist, “What I said about turning back time, don’t share it. People will only want to use it for their own advantage.”</p><p>There’s an uncomfortable vein of vulnerability in the words—in Byleth’s look and presence, listless in the window. A reminder of their youth and larger disqualifications, both for the teaching post they’d been assigned and the matters they have found themself entangled in since.</p><p>Edelgard draws back her piercing stare, only to have to contend with meeting Claude’s own. And in spite of all they normally hold back from each other, there is a telling kind of recognition that passes between them in the standoff that ensues. That they both would have gladly used such power.</p><p>And truly, wasn’t that Byleth’s inherent appeal? A trusting person of untold power and without any agenda of their own?</p><p>But Byleth is not their ally, and that power is not theirs to use.</p><p>Instead, Edelgard would likely have to face it in order to take the Holy Tomb and deal a proper strike against Rhea. How to win in such circumstances? Against inconceivable odds?</p><p>It’s the same maddening night she has relived countless times before, but somehow this darkness looms more ominously, the cold more penetrating as Byleth recedes faintly back into their room. With more distance from her fatal encounter, Edelgard has repossession of her body, but now it is her mind that threatens to get the better of her.</p><p>This—this is precisely why Edelgard did not want to get caught up in any of Claude’s ploys. They offer no solid footing to stand on, just the harrowing uncertainty she’s been staving off ever since this night has started to repeat itself.</p><p>Edelgard knows her strength and determination, but there is still the inescapable truth of the patchwork that holds her together. If she pulls too hard on any one thread, she may unravel completely. If it came to it—if she had need to—she’d pull the thread herself. But not yet. Not like this. Not for nothing.</p><p>“Edelgard,” Claude says, and she nearly startles to see him so close, the moonlight reflected in his eyes. “Okay there?”</p><p>She registers the stranglehold she has her upper arms locked in. With conscious effort uncrosses her arms, lowering them back to her side.</p><p>“Are you?” she rejoins because she cannot possibly answer that question without betraying that she is not. “Satisfied with what you’ve discovered so far?”</p><p>“No,” he says, completely frank for once. “Not even close. I feel like I’m losing my mind which—” He paces away, studying the sky and the stars’ encroaching reign and shakes his head. “Decides it. It’s probably for the best to take a break to process and regroup.”</p><p>“A break?” she echoes, her voice lowering with equal distaste and disbelief. “What is all of this if not a break?”</p><p>“Really? This is what you’re like when you’re relaxed? There’s an actual vein twitching on your forehead.”</p><p>“There is not—” she sputters, a hand shooting up unconsciously to cover the spot and confirm that fact for herself.</p><p>His mouth lifts into a small smile, unrepentant for the prevarication. “If we take a day, what’s the worst that could happen?”</p><p>The night is a canvas, too easy for her imagination to work upon. Her father dwells within it, sitting upon his throne and besieged by enemies. He stares, dead-eyed, towards her, waiting for her to relieve him of a burden she means to bear.</p><p>It goes without saying, but say it she apparently must. “Another day we spend trapped. A day wasted, filled with nothing.” A twisted inversion of a wish she’d once held for herself.</p><p>He heaves a breath out, his exhalation misting in the air. “So, I don’t know. Go fill it with something then. Whatever’s happening, don’t we still have some control over our lives?” Slowly, his look turns curious again, as if he cannot help himself. “There must be something you like to do. Besides beheading archbishops and facing off with yours truly, I mean. ‘Cause don’t get me wrong, our lovely interludes have been the best part of the night so far, but I’m thinking there’s got to be something else. Maybe even something a little more benign.”</p><p>She almost wants to laugh. Stage a war. Work to desecrate a false goddess. Plan to overthrow an entire systemic way of life and thinking. That’s all her life amounts to anymore.</p><p>Claude makes a show of thinking. “If I had to make a guess…”</p><p>“Having a reprieve to myself,” she pronounces severely. And it is true, especially in the face of his constant prying, in one form or another.</p><p>Whatever passes over his countenance, it is too quick for her to have a chance of reading the emotion behind it. In its wake his mouth tugs wryly. “Okay, I can take a hint.” His voice goes as hushed as the creeping darkness. “Have a good night, Edelgard.”</p><p>Her eyes track him until he scales the stonework again, leaving her there behind the dormitory as alone as she’d asked to be. The night only settles closer until it presses right upon her, a smothering hand.</p><p>She closes her eyes, controlling her breaths and focusing on what she can still discern. The rustle of her hair against her face, the creak of a tree in the breeze. Muffled voices of her fellow students, even laughter, as they begin to return to their rooms.</p><p>Her heart clenches like a fist, eyes reopening unconsciously, and the further back she recedes, the more she can see. Annette dancing and singing to herself as she closes her door behind her. Raphael barreling into Ignatz’s room so excitedly he almost upends Ignatz’s side table. Dorothea in Petra’s room, smiling at some anecdote or tale Petra is sharing, seated at her desk.</p><p>With a vengeance, the divide she’s always felt between herself and her classmates reemerges. Edelgard still the distant onlooker, yearning for simpler days of schooling.</p><p>How had she even spent her night before she’d known it would repeat? Confined to her room. Sleepless and anxious as she thought of demons that still needed slaying.</p><p>It’s only a faint sound in the darkness that breaks the hold the view has on her at last. She whirls around, a blur moving low across the ground. It stills in the moonlight, one of the monastery’s many cats, black in coat, its bright yellow eyes staring out at her.</p><p>One minute slips into the next, neither of them moving until Edelgard caves to uncertain impulse, crouching down. Finds herself softening her voice, calling to it. It takes one step, then a second, front paw extended, considering, but never fully closing the space between them.</p><p>More footsteps approach first, and Edelgard is the one who scatters, the cat leaping forward towards the advancing figure. Just Ashe, there to feed the stray, but she is already gone, one with the shadows.</p><p>In the gloom, the main keep of the monastery rises as an extension of the sky, the torchlight on its second level burning as tranquilly as the stars they hover alongside. Rhea surely present, overseeing her audience and untouched by the night. Both their deaths rendered meaningless.</p><p>Their lives, too.</p><p>The reprieve Edelgard seeks does not come, her thoughts circling and futile. Her body moves of its own accord, equally adrift. Despair at her heels, she finds herself past the gates, back into the mountains proper.</p><p>She’s picked her way across them countless nights before, but there is something different about not having even the pretense of a purpose or destination, the scenery coming into proper focus. Each ridge and dip of the mountainside stretching before her, strikingly illuminated by the light of the stars and moon.</p><p>She does not know whether it is a consolation or a torment, to have the nature she’s always loved offered up before her here. To be trapped with clear air and an open expanse.</p><p>A rushing in her ears, led by the wind’s restlessness, spurs a memory, one of many jagged fragments. Some she dare not piece together, letting the void within her take the worst of the pain she carries.</p><p>This memory, though, of a void beyond her own. The first time she’d made it to the cliffs off the coast of Enbarr and witnessed the thunder of the waves breaking by thin moonlight. The feeling of being humbled and terrified and awed all at once. The certainty that she would never resurface if she were to fall into those depths.</p><p>She slows, shivering with the recollection, the silence too complete. She searches for life as fleeting as it might be. The crushed, deadened grass, half-covered in the slush of snow. The evergreen pines that stand stolidly in the breeze. In the distance, a fox yells as an owl takes to the sky, out on the hunt.</p><p>Farther above, a shape rushes by, too fast and too early to be the coming snowfall and too large to be anything but a flying mount. A wyvern, she reasons. A sight she’s never noticed before in all her surveyance of the area. Claude, the only explanation, fading from view again.</p><p>She finds her footing, increasing her pace. Not in fruitless pursuit, but in the tenacity to keep going for herself alone. In the wilderness she does not find herself. Only treads across it, working her body up into an exhaustion to keep from sinking into the worst of her mind’s thoughts and fears.</p><p>But there is nothing to stop their pull, insistent as ever, when she’s returned to the dining hall. The undertow beckons her up the steps of the monastery, so that she might have the chance to fully drown.</p><p>In her audience chamber Rhea smiles as serenely as ever, none the worse for her beheading, but in Edelgard’s chest comes the treasonous feeling of her own wound, overshadowing the victorious blow she’d dealt. Relives the moment and its pain and tumult until the knight posted at the audience chamber’s entrance looks to her, inquiring.</p><p>She finds the strength to pull away, steps short and and heavy and belligerent. Does not even know exactly how she comes to the library, but halts once she reaches it, finding Claude tucked in his old corner, besieged by books. Idly, he flips through one’s pages, his eyes trained on some point in the distance, clearly lost in thought.</p><p>He is as much of a distraction as he’s ever been, but here at least is a fight whose victory might have some lasting power. She stands straighter in anticipation.</p><p>“Buried in your books again?” she challenges.</p><p>If she sounds a little weary, so does he as he snaps his volume shut. “It’s where I always end up, after all. But I’ll admit, I didn’t expect to be graced again by your charming presence any time soon.”</p><p>Unamused, she replies, “You know very well you’re the charmer between us.”</p><p>He rests his head against his shoulder as he looks askance at her. “Is that a compliment? Because I’ll take one from you any way I can get it.”</p><p>“Take it as you like. Only know your charms do not work on everyone; they certainly have no effect upon me.”</p><p>He shakes slightly with silent laughter and puts his book aside with finality. “Well, let me ask you at my most charming still. Did you enjoy your night to yourself? Come to terms with things?”</p><p>“I’d sooner ask how your flight was.”</p><p>“Ah,” he says, “so you noticed that, did you?”</p><p>“You’re not as subtle as you like to think you are.”</p><p>“Or maybe I’ve just met my match with you,” he says, voice smooth even as she can see his mind working. To what end she does not know until he tries a grin and proves his thoughts may not stray that far from her own. “Actually, what do you say to a game between us? Really prove where we stand.”</p><p>“If you mean one of the harebrained antics you’re always getting up to with your house,” she warns, “then you must already know my answer.”</p><p>“Not at all. I was thinking something so proper even you couldn’t object.” But there is that telltale hint of mischief in his voice that he immediately makes good on. “Chess. With just a little extra fun.”</p><p>She has barely leveled him with a frown before he adds, “Winner learns something about the loser. Personally, I’d love to know any one of the secrets you’re still keeping.”</p><p>Her mouth lifts into a firm line. “Whereas I want to know where your allegiances truly lie and anything you’re plotting. Where you come from and your actual legitimacy.”</p><p>Starting with his pinky, he presses his fingers one by one to his thumb. A means of counting all his own. Laughing at her, he says, “That’s no less than four things. You’ll have to choose.”</p><p>“So you’re saying I get a choice?” she says, eyes narrowing.</p><p>He winks. “Sure. Both what you share and what to ask. As the challenger, I’ll surrender anything you wish to know.”</p><p>It is senseless to argue the point, but her pride cannot deny itself of the opportunity. “You’d only set those conditions if you were certain you’d win, but your hubris will go unrewarded.”</p><p>“Will it really?” he answers. “Don’t forget the way the game even made its way to Fódlan.”</p><p>“Do not discredit Adrestia’s own trading routes. It would have found its way even without Leicester merchants.”</p><p>As is often the case, Claude’s private amusement is unequal to the moment and all the more grating for it.</p><p>“Did you mean to play or not?” she demands, making him acquiesce. It's in the deserted Golden Deer classroom that they settle, setting up its spare chess set and bringing two desks together. The white pieces fall to her hand and in arranging the board, her mind naturally strays towards family.</p><p>It was her eldest sister, Herleva, who had taught her, back when Edelgard had only admired the craft of the pieces and the make and pattern of the board. “You’ll like this game,” she said in a regard that went beyond the bloodlines and politics that threatened to pit Edelgard and her half-siblings against one another—Herleva secure enough in her place and rank in the family to extend affection to a sister whose own mother had been driven out. “You have the mind for it, and aren’t we all the players?”</p><p>“And what piece?” Edelgard asked, eye level with the board, peering up at her sister’s towering figure, her features so distinct from her own.</p><p>Herleva considered, her calloused hand selecting one and setting it before Edelgard. “The rook. Direct and able to reach far.”</p><p>Who, then, had been the first to call her Little Rook? Herleva’s twin, Berengar? The two so often a pair and there with them? Edelgard struggles with the thought, uncertain. What she does remember is playing at her sister’s window, taking in the sweeping hills and the sundrenched city of Enbarr as they waited on the other’s turn to come to a close.</p><p>Playing in the empty classroom’s cover of darkness, there is no view beyond the board and Claude’s glowing face, flickering in the candlelight. Through the course of his prolonged opening moves his lips purse in exaggerated thought, long eyelashes sweeping low.</p><p>They raise suddenly as he meets her gaze, Edelgard caught staring, and she tramples down the urge to return her eyes to the board, remaining forthright.</p><p>It is him who breaks away first, stealing a glance downward as he finally advances a pawn. “It really is a shame we haven’t had the chance to spend time together like this before.”</p><p>Edelgard moves with immediacy, maneuvering her bishop free only to see his hand still upon his pawn as he draws the piece back to its original position. In irritation, she takes back her own play and responds, “Next you’ll say you wish us to be friends.”</p><p>His eyes lift back to hers, his pawn unmoved. “Don’t you think you could actually use one, stuck in a never ending night?”</p><p>As far as attacks go, it is a successful one, preying upon an insecurity she’s never had the luxury to invest in growing up or even here at the monastery. She should be gone, leaving her classmates behind until the appointed hour when she means to force their hands.</p><p>She hopes her house would join her, but there is the persistent doubt they will not. She could not even blame them. Would give them a way out, if it came to that. Edelgard knows her path is not meant for everyone and that camaraderie does not come as naturally to her as it does to others.</p><p>Others like Claude—or at least that is what one might assume, watching him from afar. The fact remains that he is more sociable than her, liable to talk to anyone, whether in his house or with a perfect stranger. So easily charismatic and winsome. But forced to confront the mystery he is, she doesn’t think a single person at the monastery knows who he really is, owing it’s still a secret nearly a year later. And it is not that he has a confidant, a retainer or close friend with whom he’d walked into the monastery. No one he spends time with over anyone else. Edelgard had Hubert, but Claude…</p><p>She’s let the conversation go unattended for too long. Claude regards her over the chess board with all the undivided attention he pretends not to give the game.</p><p>“Do you even have any friends of your own?” she asks, sharper for her own hurt and his scrutiny. “Considering you never really share anything about yourself?”</p><p>Her words find their mark, the shadows of his face in the unsteady light only growing more severe. Still, he does not break their eye contact, and in their extended silence comes another understanding, unsought and unspoken. A shared solitude, as impenetrable as the night.</p><p>Claude smiles, a little pityingly. At himself, or her, or both, she cannot tell. “By that logic, we’ll be well on our way to being fast friends after this game, won’t we?”</p><p>His pity, whomever it is intended for, only rankles. “Perhaps if you talked less and played more,” she says, fingers digging into the grain of the desk. “At this rate the night will be over before your next move.”</p><p>He forgets his pawn, sliding his knight over so casually as if he’s given it no thought at all. She knows better than to believe it to be so, but what then to make of his hesitation? Indecision? Mere stalling to distract her? She frowns up at him, taking the pawn he’d deliberated over for so long in retaliation.</p><p>Claude does not increase the speed of his playing, and more and more she believes that to be his strategy, bringing her to the edge of impatience. In the time he gives her to think she is already considering several turns ahead, premediating plays that become irrelevant in the wake of the move Claude ultimately makes, so often against her predictions.</p><p>She takes much of his side of the board, but it is not enough to stop him from decimating hers in return.</p><p>Her king cornered, Claude smiles at her. “So what will you be sharing?”</p><p>“You’re not even going to try to lead me towards what you want to hear?” she returns, not to oblige but rather to use the moment in just such a way against him. If she must talk, then the objective can only be to get him talking as well. To broker an opening to a conversation that might actually provide more context to who he is.</p><p>“Fair’s fair,” he says. “I said it was your choice. Besides, I’m starting to realize that needling you for answers isn’t working.”</p><p>“Did you finally?” she says dryly. “That tendency of yours is undoubtedly one of your worst.” She stares past him into the recesses of the classroom where the light poorly penetrates—all the invitation that the past needs to call upon her, always bleeding into the present.</p><p>“Once, I did believe in the goddess,” she confesses, trapped back under the palace in a cell, unheeded prayers falling from her bitten-raw lips. Back at the start when there was still everything to lose, her siblings held alongside her.</p><p>The door of the cell opens, a figure reaching in. A voice, mocking—<em>“Do you really think that your goddess exists?”</em></p><p>Forcibly, she slams that door closed. Shuts out the voice and remembers exactly where she is. Claude across from her. Another of her losses played out on the board between them.</p><p>She suppresses a shiver against the cold sweat along her nape, but she cannot still herself completely, flexing her wrists just to remember she has control and feeling in them still.</p><p>Wets her smoothed lips, forcing her heavy tongue to work again. “My faith, though, amounted to nothing and now I’m capable of thinking more rationally. I only see the Church for its harm and hypocrisy. The same as you, judging by your grand speech.”</p><p>In the quiet he answers her with, she waits for him to challenge her for a greater secret. Again, he defies her expectations. “And that’s no small thing to have in common, is it?” He eyes the expanse of the chessboard. “I guess the question then is where to go from there.”</p><p>She’s already revealed too much of both her methods and intentions in the blood she’s shed in this night. Speaking now, she reins in her fire, her words cool and precise. “Anyone with a vested interest in Fódlan and the means to intervene could not let the Church go unchecked.”</p><p>“That far, we can still agree,” he says, tapping his finger against the corner of the board. The pieces that stand across it yet rattle in place. “The way the Church lies to and misleads Fódlan for its own gain is a glaring problem.”</p><p>He cannot, of course, know the extent of the Church’s lies, but at least he can acknowledge they are capable of them. It does not change anything, except the respect she is willing to pay him. Not everyone can see that far without her having to declare it first.</p><p>The candle at their side gutters, casting them into momentary darkness and then back into tentative light. A stalemate, Edelgard decides in its gloam. An improvement, over her loss in their game of chess.</p><p>As if to remind her of that very loss, Claude reaches for the pieces he has captured from her, turning them slowly over in his hand. “You know,” he says, “not to be completely predictable, but the more I think about it, the more it seems like this night might just be the universe’s way of telling us we should be on friendlier terms.”</p><p>“I do not care what the universe supposedly thinks. The last thing I came to the Officers Academy for is to make friends with you.”</p><p>He raises his eyebrows at her. “And whatever did I do to earn that distinction? Because I’m not content to defer to you or fold my hand neatly into your own?”</p><p>She looks down to his hand. To the queen he’s taken from her. “You speak of friendship,” she tells him, “when all you mean is to use me, don’t you?”</p><p>He startles into a slow laugh. “If you’re going to put it like that then go ahead and try to use me back.” He hides half a smile behind his free hand, too self-aware of how to leverage the advantage of his looks as he peers invitingly up at her.</p><p>It might be an effort less wasted if she hadn’t learned long ago not to trust someone based on mere appearances.</p><p>“I promise I won’t mind,” he adds, as if that alone could sway her.</p><p>Better than anyone, she understands reluctant, distrustful alliances. Cannot escape the repercussions of taking one on. The difference here is that she has the ability to make a truer choice, no knife being held to her back to compromise her path. Of her uncle and his ilk she also knows what to expect. She cannot say the same for Claude, nor is there any clear gain she is capable of detecting.</p><p>“And what would I even use you for?” she says, to the point. “What would you bring to the table? What power or connections? The Roundtable is tearing itself apart, and you are recognized as little more than an interloper.”</p><p>Even as she poses the questions, she knows he can give no proper answer. He sets her queen down at last, his expression all amusement but his breezy tone betraying another sentiment.</p><p>“So that’s all you see me as, too.” He lets the words linger, sitting with her in uncharacteristic stillness, but if he expects her to contradict him, he is disappointed. His nod becomes a shrug, casting off the conversation with great, affected nonchalance. “In that case, I guess I’ll just have to keep company elsewhere.”</p><p>This time she does not watch him go, facing down the spot he’s vacated. Still she tracks his movement in the faint echo of his footsteps, her eyes drifting back down to her king, alone and forfeit. Only enemies left to surround it.</p><p>Edelgard lifts it in her gloved hand, observing the piece’s blunt details and feeling its weight and contours. Slides it smoothly across the board. But no matter the direction, there is no place to turn to change the decided outcome.</p><p>Time becomes uncertain with the piece in hand, her careful study perhaps not enough to keep her mind present. When she steps back outside, Claude is gone and so is the approaching dawn.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Haha… no, establishing a Common Enemy is not enough to push past our trust issues and deceptions here. Settle in cause we’re going the full agonizing route to connection and vulnerability.</p><p>Thanks so much for your thoughts and engagement so far. They mean a lot to me on this project in particular.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>A content warning for those who'd prefer one up front: this chapter contains a less visceral panic attack.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It’s as though the more Edelgard wishes to avoid Claude, the more he is everywhere she turns. Like maneuvering with a compass that only points in his direction, the unnerving focal point of any change in the night.</p><p>In the dreary monotony he cuts too distracting and too lively a figure, laughing and flaunting the ease in which he socializes with everyone he meets. A constant reminder of the company she’s denied herself.</p><p>Instead, Edelgard retreats to the training grounds, where there is no need for company, just her axe and the skills she’s spent too little time honing recently. She means to properly wield its weight and promise—to reorient herself—but even there Claude crosses her path, coming round to talk Leonie into yet another foolish misadventure. When she makes the mistake of catching his eye he twists his mouth comically at her, eyebrows raised.</p><p>“Are you having fun?” she asks with certain derision, never one to back down from a potential confrontation.</p><p>“More than you, I bet,” he says, wholly unbothered as her axe goes slack in her hands. She heaves it back up, glaring, while he makes a point to nearly drawl his follow up, “That thing I said about being a nobody of no importance?”</p><p>“‘Insignificant mortals’ is what you called us,” she reminds him, throwing the words back with fresh contempt. They sting all the more—as surprising as finding skin mottled over and bruised—in light of Byleth’s revelation and their relative powerlessness.</p><p>Claude’s eyes lift skyward, like on a silent, laughing prayer of exasperation. “Yeah, that. If I’m going to be one then what does indulging a little really matter? I’m still alive. I’d rather not just forget the good and petty parts that come along with it.”</p><p>The good and petty parts apparently include making a show of gathering everyone in his house for sledding down the mountain’s snow banks or a drawing circle led by Ignatz’s flustered instruction as Lorenz loftily offers to pose. In an eating contest they clear out the dining hall’s scraps, coming down to a close call between Raphael and Leonie, but when Lysithea argues why she should be the rightful winner, all hell breaks loose in a food fight that concludes with the scolding of the century from Seteth. To compensate, Claude has a quieter evening with Marianne at the stables, releasing a skittish colt that he lets drag him around on its lead rope.</p><p>All pointless, unproductive anecdotes she’d sooner forget and despises that she cannot once she’s come to witness them. Even more, she loathes the part of her that yearns for the same kind of blithe simplicity and overcompensates in her axe drills until she attempts too much too soon and pulls a muscle in her shoulder at the start of a fresh evening.</p><p>Dropping the axe with a clatter, she stalks back through the night where Claude of course awaits, this time lounging with Hilda in the courtyard, the two of them brazenly gossiping. Her chest tightens at the thought of what might be passing between them as Claude languidly tracks her progress towards the Cathedral, his eyes twinkling in jest and Edelgard most assuredly the joke.</p><p>In the early evening, Dorothea stands on the bridge as she always does, calling out to her in greeting. Perhaps it is loneliness. Perhaps desperation. It does not matter. Edelgard finally stops.</p><p>“I’m so glad you could join me, Edie,” Dorothea says, nothing less than stunning in the starlight. It is easy to picture her on the stage, performing one of her more dramatic operatic pieces—the climax before the tragic fall, for all that Dorothea smiles now. “I wasn’t sure with your adorable face all twisted up in thought again.”</p><p>“Yes,” Edelgard responds, her throat working, “there are things that have been on my mind.”</p><p>In front of them, the world falls away, a chasm as deep as the feeling that runs Edelgard through, but Dorothea is an immediate, warm presence against the cold night. Her long, shining hair drifts along the wind, brushing against Edelgard’s cheek, and it is so unspeakably tender—just the welcome nearness of another person beside her. She closes her eyes, breathes deep, and catches the sweet inkling of either Dorothea’s perfume or the product she lovingly works into her hair. Edelgard does not know, could not even guess, the exact scent, but she admires it all the same.</p><p>“My apologies,” Edelgard says unthinkingly, striving to steady her voice.</p><p>“Why are you apologizing?” Dorothea asks in genuine confusion. Graceful, she folds her arms against the bridge’s ledge, peering at her sidelong.</p><p>“Perhaps,” Edelgard recognizes, “I should have been by sooner.”</p><p>Dorothea laughs a little strangely, though affectionate. “How could I expect you any sooner? I called you and you came, so I am content.” Her shoulders rise with a sigh, and even in that there is a kind of musicality, as if she’s still in the midst of a performance. “We’ve spent so little time together recently and between you being so busy and Hubie gone now for the month, it feels like graduation is really upon us, all of us about to head in our own directions.”</p><p>“And you wish we wouldn’t?” Edelgard asks. “That our graduation wouldn’t come?”</p><p>“I’ll admit I’m not sure if I’m ready to say goodbye. I had hoped—” Dorothea bites her lip, no trace of her stage presence about her now. “Well, that I might have secured a future alongside someone before time ran out here. But here I am, unattached and alone and with more of the unknown ahead.”</p><p>“I know something of that feeling,” Edelgard admits, though it feels the night is hovering—merely waiting to prey upon any perceived moment of weakness. “I thought the future was at least there to claim, but with this night, rather, I’m just living in endless anticipation. I’m...” Twice she swallows before she manages the word. “Stuck. And I don’t know how not to be.”</p><p>“Edie.” Gently, Dorothea places a hand on Edelgard’s shoulder, her eyes earnest. “I’m sure you of all people can find a way forward.”</p><p>Edelgard shakes her head, shaking off the platitude that means nothing against the problem she currently faces. “But if I could I wanted—I <em>want</em>—to offer you a place beside me. A path to walk. I will need people; even I can’t move the earth alone.”</p><p>“Your reform?” Dorothea wagers with a fondness that soon grows contemplative, her forehead wrinkling over. “I don’t imagine it would be easy, but if you really could take apart the nobility… There may be a place for me beside you there.”</p><p>That dream, however, wars forever with the brutal reality of change—the inevitable and imminent bloodshed that Edelgard withholds from her and everyone still. All of them unaware of how far Edelgard would drag anyone who is willing to stand at her side. But even then, knowing all she does and harboring all her doubts, Edelgard cannot find it within herself to contest Dorothea’s sentiment. She needs something to cling to, tonight of all nights.</p><p>"Do you think the others might think so too?” Edelgard asks, too tentative, the ghost of her breath writhing in the darkness.</p><p>Dorothea’s regard is all softness in a way that leaves Edelgard feeling like a wretched, fragile thing, and she stiffens where she stands, bracing herself lest she shatter at Dorothea’s response or its delivery.</p><p>“I don’t know, Edie,” Dorothea says quietly. “I couldn’t speak for them, but I suppose time will tell what we all decide.”</p><p>Time will tell nothing though, and the words hang heavily in the silence like a monologue delivered to an empty and echoing theater, life’s production brought to a halt.</p><p>And then the night produces an indistinct sound—like there is a proper audience after all, closely watching them. Edelgard turns, hand already reaching for her dagger, but it is only the unbroken night that stares back.</p><p>Paranoia laces through her veins regardless, drawing her back into the night’s growing depths with only a half-remembered apology to Dorothea. In the courtyard her heart quickens to find it conspicuously empty of both Hilda and Claude, though the night’s advancement may be explanation enough, others since moving on from where they start their evening in the monastery. At the fishing pier Petra is absent, and it is in her room instead that Edelgard finds her, penning something at her desk.</p><p>The same question Edelgard had asked of Dorothea brings her across the threshold, and in her greeting Petra offers one of her usual smiles, radiating a confidence that only smarts. It’s that same sense of conviction that Edelgard misses for herself.</p><p>“I am just writing a letter home,” Petra informs her, and Edelgard can just make out the less familiar syllabary, rendered half-illegible by the script that Petra uses. “About all that has happened here at the monastery. There is no end of things to share.”</p><p>Petra’s smile slips as Edelgard works to place all the events that have led up to this night—all that has been and all that awaits, seemingly out of reach—and in the intervening time a knock announces Dorothea. She hesitates herself, no doubt caught off guard to find Edelgard there after witnessing her abrupt abscondment.</p><p>“Oh, I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Dorothea says, sure to have realized the reason for Edelgard’s visit. Her eyes meet Edelgard’s but it’s on Petra that they land.</p><p>The wind bangs the open window’s shutter against stone and so resurfaces the memory of seeing Dorothea and Petra together here in this room if not for Edelgard’s intervention.</p><p>“No, you are not interrupting at all,” Petra responds, sitting so upright she nearly leaves her seat. Though a chill snakes its way inside, Petra’s voice is somehow warm enough to counteract it. “I am happy to speak with you.”</p><p>“I think I’ll just take another turn around the monastery and then maybe we can have a chat of our own,” Dorothea promises and closes the door softly behind her.</p><p>In the ensuing silence, Edelgard resists the temptation to shift uneasily upon her feet as Petra’s attention remains upon the empty doorway, a small frown upending her relentless sanguinity.</p><p>“I hope Dorothea is okay,” Petra says to herself in the end. “She looks like she is having sad thoughts.”</p><p>“I spoke to her just before,” Edelgard says, finding surer footing as the night’s topic presents itself. “She seems a little melancholy, thinking of the future. How things will be changing and life after the academy.”</p><p>“Yes, I am always thinking of the future, too,” Petra responds, but her brow furrows as she turns back upon her letter. When Edelgard does not speak, Petra’s fingers curl around the corners of the parchment, pulling it taut. “I am Brigid’s future, after all. But as for my future after the academy… I do not know.”</p><p>At the admission, she only compels herself to sit straighter, unwavering as she looks back upon Edelgard. “But I have worked hard this year to prove I am your equal. For Brigid to be recognized by the Empire. I hope when you are Emperor, you will. Maybe then, I can decide.”</p><p>“I do recognize you,” Edelgard reassures, but it is her own unsteadiness that comes back in full force, seeing the futility in broaching this topic with Petra without the actual intent of sharing her own plans for the future. Just like with Dorothea, there is only so much she can say, in this current moment in time.</p><p>Still she tries to reach out a little further to her. “As Emperor, I will make sure you can choose what comes next for you. That is what you deserve.”</p><p>“No, that is what Brigid deserves,” Petra disputes, with quieter but no less indomitable feeling. “When you think of me, do not just think of me but my country, too.”</p><p>It is a sentiment that Edelgard might have voiced herself and a reminder of their likeness: two future rulers willing to put their lives second to the fate of their land. But greater still is what distinguishes them, reflected in the way Petra regards her now, intently waiting upon a reply. Acknowledgement that Edelgard is the one who will soon hold Brigid’s fate in her own hands while her mind and plans remain preoccupied with Fódlan.</p><p>But how to even grapple with transitioning power back to the vassal state in a way that would not bring about in-fighting among those who have lent her military backing? Owing to that uncertainty, Edelgard does not believe she has a response to Brigid that would satisfy the suspended hope in Petra’s eye, and the longer she delays her response, the further the light from the window creeps, a crossbeam of shadow falling against Petra’s face.</p><p>Not just futile to attempt this conversation, Edelgard realizes, but thoughtless—even callous—to walk into this room having thought only of how trapped she is while disregarding the fact that Petra has been openly trapped for far longer, here at the monastery.</p><p>Outside, comes a familiar cry—Caspar, as if he’s charging into battle—and it proves enough of a disruption to break the moment’s tension and excuse herself from it. With more apologies, she goes to investigate the aberration and attempts to tell herself she is not a coward for it.</p><p>She discovers Caspar near the stairs to the second floor of the dormitory, running through various brawler stances, and Edelgard not his only observer. Claude looks on in avid interest beside him, standing in the greenhouse’s shadow.</p><p>Even from a distance, she can see Caspar’s mouth running, and she does not have to draw much closer to have his loudly ringing voice give way to coherence.</p><p>“Oh yeah, Edelgard loves to go on about the nobility and how it’s ruining the Empire and why I should care and all that.” His scoff turns into a laugh as he demonstrates a punch. “She kinda really beats it into you, you know? Talking about changing things.”</p><p>At her approach, Claude turns his head and regards her with a smile that can only be deemed insufferable. “Is that right?” he asks of her.</p><p>It’s easy and decisive anger that rises within her, not at all defensive but an attack in her own right. “What are you doing, talking to a member of my house, Claude? Did you tire of all your close friends so soon?”</p><p>“What,” he says with deliberate disregard, “like I’m not allowed to? If Caspar wants to show me his incredible technique and have a nice little chat at the same time, what’s it to you?”</p><p>“I should say it would mean something to me, considering you were only using the opportunity to discuss me.”</p><p>His mouth curls even further around the edges. “You really are as conceited as you’d expect a princess to be.” In a show of false emotion he places a hand over his heart. “Let me promise though that my interest in you is nothing but genuine admiration.”</p><p>At Edelgard’s glare, Caspar frowns and straightens from his stance, stretching his limbs out. “Yeah... I’m not really liking this weird energy here. It’s messing with my form. I think I’ll just leave you two to it.”</p><p>“Aw, look at what you’ve done,” Claude complains as Caspar noisily climbs the dormitory’s steps. “You made him run off. I hope you don’t do the same to Linhardt when I go to him next.” He taps his chin thoughtfully. “Although I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Linhardt <em>run</em>.”</p><p>“What are you intending?” Edelgard cuts in, loath to lose the material point in the midst of his obvious redirection. “To press him for information about me as well?”</p><p>He folds his arms behind his head, lax and vulnerable and as if she poses no threat at all. A maneuver that is more than enough to set her teeth on edge, though such a reaction is likely half his design in posturing so.</p><p>“That would be an added bonus, but really, I’m curious to hear if he could have any theories for tonight. What has he told you?”</p><p>In her silence Claude finds all the answer he needs.</p><p>“Wow, you’ve just been sleeping on that brilliant mind?” he says, sounding not surprised in the least. “Well, I really do have to see to that then.”</p><p>He is already darting over to Linhardt’s room before she can even think of stopping him, and Linhardt opens his door looking as aggrieved and as pale as an apparition. He blinks once, looking upon Claude like a near stranger. Edelgard supposes they are, though they’ve all shared the monastery’s halls for the better part of a year.</p><p>“Yes, is there something? I’m busy.” He bypasses Claude and his eager look to nearly send a dour one of his own towards Edelgard—but that would take too much effort, wouldn’t it? “Did you bring reinforcements to lecture me?”</p><p>It takes Edelgard a moment to remember anew that their last interaction had in fact been another instance of Linhardt taking offense at her trying to manage his time and priorities.</p><p>Claude makes a face in the interim. “Lectures aren’t really my thing, but I do have a puzzle for you.” He eyes Linhardt’s books and notes. “You do research on Crests, right?”</p><p>Linhardt eases marginally. “Yes, that is where my main research interest lies.”</p><p>“Know anything about time anomalies?”</p><p>“Time anomalies?” Linhardt lifts a hand to his chin, contemplative. “I can’t say that I do.”</p><p>“No connections to Crests or even the saints and goddess?”</p><p>“A connection to time?” Linhardt considers. “What a fascinating if baseless theory to put forth.”</p><p>“Well, I can’t say that’s the answer I was hoping for, but,” Claude slips inside and sets himself up beside Linhardt’s desk, “if that’s not a working theory of yours, what is? There’s a million questions I still have when it comes to Crests, and I have nothing but time tonight.”</p><p>Linhardt, it seems, will bear an imposition to his studies if it grants him a chance to explain them to a willing audience. Edelgard does not leave them, carefully taking up her own corner in the book-strewn room, but she also does not closely follow along. She already knows what she needs to—the intricacies thereof will not change what Crests are; they only beckon the shadows of memories she’d sooner leave behind.</p><p>“Are you here to chaperone?” Claude asks at some point, remembering her even when Linhardt seems to have forgotten her presence entirely. He grins, leaning in closer to Linhardt. “I promise nothing untoward will happen between us, right Linhardt?”</p><p>Linhardt suffers a sigh at the interruption. “Whatever you mean to imply or for whatever intent, I assure you I couldn't care less. Can we get back to more interesting matters?”</p><p>Claude is easily swayed, as interested in their conversation and its many esoteric tangents as he was at its beginning and quick to reel off his own thoughts. Eventually though, the sun itself not long off, Linhardt tires. He ends the conversation with a protracted yawn and simply curls up on his bed without a word to properly see them out. He’s asleep in the space of just a few moments.</p><p>Edelgard is quiet in shutting the door behind them, but her temper has far from cooled. To his credit, or perhaps the opposite, Claude has not yet run off, staring back at her as they run down the rest of their night.</p><p>“Really,” he quips, “why stick around if you weren’t interested at all? Worried Linhardt and the rest will prefer my company? Jealous, even?”</p><p>“If anyone is jealous of another’s company it would seem you are,” she counters. “Eavesdropping on me and Dorothea.”</p><p>He does not even deny it. Only shrugs, arms splayed wide—all but a gesture of surrender if not for his quick tongue. “Now I wouldn’t exactly call it eavesdropping if I had a real interest in joining the conversation. But I read the moment and saw I was better off elsewhere with other new friends. If you’re feeling threatened I’d say go and take up with my house, too, but I’m not sure you could, actually. We’re an odd bunch.”</p><p>“Is that meant to be a slight towards me or your house?”</p><p>“A slight?” He repeats, laughing. “If it’s a slight, then against you, absolutely. Nothing better than a good group of misfits. Just probably too much for your endearingly refined sensibilities to handle. I’d bet you wouldn’t get far with anyone in my house.”</p><p>“Another challenge?” she presses. “But would it even be worthwhile, considering how little your friendship amounts to? I doubt they’d have anything to share about you that I don’t already know.”</p><p>His ever languid body stiffens, those words, at least, having struck, and yet it does not satisfy as it should, especially when he just as soon digs his own knife into the same wound she also possesses. “Says the person who clearly doesn’t know how to get on with her own house.”</p><p>Around them, the night dwindles and along with it goes the remainder of her patience. “I’m tired of your games,” she says, voice struck against whetstone. “Stop hiding behind all your talk and trying to go around my back. Be honest and straightforward like a leader should for once.”</p><p>He raises an eyebrow at her, half-amused, half-intrigued. “Are you the one putting forth a challenge now?”</p><p>Yes, and finally on her own terms. “A proper fight,” she issues. “None of your distant, evasive archery.”</p><p>His own gaze sharpens. “Archery is not some coward’s way, you know. Ever think it might give you the most reach and perspective?”</p><p>“We’ll pick a discipline neither of us are adept in for impartiality’s sake,” she continues, unmoved. “A sword fight.”</p><p>His head tilts, considering. “Conditions?” he says slowly.</p><p>“We can keep yours, if you wish. Loser grants a secret to the winner.”</p><p>His mouth pinches in mirth. “Now who’s the overly confident one?”</p><p>She indulges in a smirk, one with just a hint of teeth. “So you are not?”</p><p>The sky lightens, nearly imperceptible, and his mouth echoes her own. “Dusk it is. See you at the training grounds.”</p><p> </p><p>***</p><p> </p><p>He is already waiting for her when she comes upon the agreed meeting spot, the picture of insouciance as he casually examines the proffered selection of swords. Over his shoulder he grins at her, tossing a training sword at her in lieu of a proper greeting.</p><p>By instinct she catches it and completes its downward arc in a swing of her own, her body moving into a readier stance learned long ago. A breeze brushes past and she can almost feel her brother Berengar’s guiding hand to refine her form. Alongside it comes the accompanying surge of pride and power that would follow as Herleva looked on in vaguely amused approval. The immediate confidence as well that had carried her over to her youngest brother, Warin, believing herself capable of coaching him in turn as their older siblings had run through drills with the training company.</p><p>Impossible to feel as she’d done then with the training sword she now holds, its grip peeling and its edge dulled and dented. Unequivocally she raises the weapon and thrusts it back upon him. “Don’t toy with me. I said no more games.”</p><p>“Have it your way,” Claude says, and she does, testing the weight of her own chosen steel. She lifts it to eye level, the better to inspect its quality. When she flips the blade, the metal glints in the dying light, and his eyes—piercing—flash across its sheen.</p><p>“Just so we’re clear,” he adds, “I’m not fighting to the death.”</p><p>“What’s a fight without the proper consequences?” she rejoins. Running her finger along the steel’s edge, she smiles faintly to see it rend her glove. “It’s not as though your death would even keep.”</p><p>“Edelgard.”</p><p>Her hand stills at the address, as direct as it is humorless, and that alone is a kind of victory that has her feeling magnanimous. “I imagine if you died your secret would be forfeit. Far be it for me to risk such a hard-earned prize.”</p><p>He eases marginally, his mouth ticking up in a tepid smile. “I’ll be sure to make it an especially good one for the show of restraint.”</p><p>“First mistake,” she advises, still a little smug. “Going into a fight with the expectation of losing.”</p><p>He turns again to the array of swords before them. “It’s called thinking of contingencies. You should try it one day.”</p><p>His pick is flimsier iron, but it suits him well, facing off at last. She hardly waits for him to assume his stance before she is bearing down upon him in a sure downward stroke. He lifts his blade to counter, the force enough to send him reeling, but for all her strength and advancement, he is faster on his feet, dancing back just out of reach, grinning at her.</p><p>With greater finesse, too, he works the weapon, his answering steps and strikes not following any clear or familiar pattern to her own precise and methodical forms. Wielding both sword and taunts he parries, his goading words just another way to disarm, and when he suddenly does take the initiative, he takes her by surprise, sidestepping her swing and lunging for her unguarded side.</p><p>“Got a little more than you bargained for, huh?” he asks as he closes in behind his own quick barrage. “Didn’t think I was capable with a sword, did you?”</p><p>Reduced to the defensive, she is at least surer in absorbing his blows, her stance more solid with no movement or energy wasted. She pivots, distancing herself from the edge of the raised platform they stand upon, then pivots again, seeking to try and push him up against it instead.</p><p>They meet once more, blades crossing nearer the hilt, and at this proximity there is no concealing the rise and fall of his chest or the sweat that dots his brow—all the effort he is also expending. Yet when he speaks it is tongue in cheek, his face casting a shadow upon hers.</p><p>“Worked out all your frustration towards me yet?”</p><p>“Not quite,” she responds and throws the entirety of her weight into their deadlock.</p><p>He slides backwards and coming upon the edge of the platform himself he gives up on holding his ground. His answer to her next strike is sloppy and one-handed as he ducks low, his other hand grasping at her cape as it flutters past. With one pull, he spins her around on her feet, then leaves her sputtering as he throws the fabric over her face.</p><p>In spite of her compromised vision, her sword still sings, slicing through air to keep him at bay until she’s thrown the cape back off in anger. Just out of reach, he crooks his mouth at her.</p><p>Dimly, she registers the calls of onlookers, taking note and commentary of their fight, but her focus begins and ends with Claude.</p><p>“So incapable of defeating me that you have to resort to tricks?” she demands, shifting on her feet, and he moves with her in sly tandem until they are circling the same ground, blades angled upwards and at the ready.</p><p>“In a real fight,” he provokes, “anything goes. All that matters is the outcome.”</p><p>He is not wrong, but that is also why this time it will be in her favor. Where he might hesitate, she has no qualm in doing what must be done. Again, she closes the distance between them, holding nothing back as she targets the greatest asset he brings to their combat: his range of movement. He mostly dodges the uninhibited sweep of his legs she makes, but does not escape entirely unscathed, blood surfacing across his thigh. He lands less sure-footed, and it’s all the opening she needs to advance once more and press her advantage.</p><p>Relentless, she charges upon him, giving him no time to regain his footing or divert her strikes until she is the one wholly dictating their fight’s course, and he is powerless to stop her. In his arms she senses his fatigue the longer she draws the exchange out, notices, too, that he favors one side to compensate for his injured leg, and his perceived weakness only spurs her forward with more intent and force until his hold upon his blade slackens and she knocks it from his grasp with one final slash of her own.</p><p>Before the iron can even clatter to the ground, she hooks her leg around his own, upending him off his feet, and he crashes down alongside his sword, the metal sharply reverberating. The point of her own blade does not abate until it rests at the hollow of his throat.</p><p>Needing air, he breathes long and deep, the movement careful and restrained. When he speaks, she can feel it through her blade. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this. It’s starting to get a little cliche, and I know you’re anything but trite.”</p><p>She withdraws her steel at last, freeing her favored arm as she stoops low over him. Solidly, she grasps him by his loosened collar and begins to lift him off the ground until he is suspended by her grip.</p><p>She leaves him dangling there, relishing the opportunity still to look down upon him. Over her shoulder, her hair slips free, falling against the side of his face, just a hand’s breadth from her own. Caught up in the totality of her stare, his eyes flicker like the stars he reveres.</p><p>“I’ll take my secret now,” she pronounces.</p><p>His eyes close, falling bodily into his ghost of laughter, and she lets him drop with the sound of it until his eyes reopen with the hint of panic. Appeased, she hauls him fully upright then pushes him back to regain her personal space. Her pleasure only grows to see him stumble for his footing.</p><p>To the forefront come other reactions, their audience remembered as Leonie clambers over to them, eyes assessing as she looks Claude over. “That was some fight,” she comments. “You okay there?”</p><p>He inspects his leg and comes away with an easy smile. “Seems like our resident princess was feeling merciful, after all.”</p><p>Edelgard shifts her weapon to her dominant arm again, hand sliding into its practiced grip, as Claude shares a short and friendly exchange with his housemate before Leonie finally moves on, telling him to make sure to get his leg looked at properly.</p><p>“As you’ve acknowledged,” Edelgard says when she has him to herself again, “you’re still alive. I’m waiting on your contingency.”</p><p>Under the guise of recollecting himself he eyes his wound with great consideration then stretches towards the sky. Stooping to pick up his fallen sword, he spins it idly by the hilt. “No requests, huh?” he asks, no doubt a nod to the stalling tactic she herself had used after losing their previous contest.</p><p>“As if you won’t tell me only what you intend and nothing more.”</p><p>“You really are catching on to me, aren’t you?” His smirk flattens, his sword steadying as he turns to properly face her once more. Over his wound ghosts his free hand. “But the truth is, I’m getting a little tired of our games, too. If you find me guarded, it’s only that I’ve always had to watch out for myself. There's been a lot of people who’d like to see harm come to me.”</p><p>It’s a response that infuriatingly only raises more questions. “And what about you made you such a target? No one seemed to even know of your existence a year ago.”</p><p>“Well, this might come as a shock, but I did exist before then, too.” No sooner does she glare at him than he walks away to replace his borrowed sword. She only dogs his steps until he has no choice but to meet her stare again. “All right, honestly? It would be nice to not have to be at odds all the time when we’re stuck in the same situation. Can even agree on some of the larger problems at play.”</p><p>“And what exactly do you see as those larger problems?” It is no less than a test, and he does not waver under her scrutiny.</p><p>“Your issue with the Church? Like I said, I’m with you. Even this vision of eliminating the nobility that you’ve been telling your house about doesn’t really faze me. I’m for people standing on equal footing, regardless of their backgrounds. Just look at my own house.”</p><p>She takes another step forward until she has nearly boxed him in between the equipment rack and the wall. “And that is what you plan to do? The future you’d work towards with the Alliance?”</p><p>He falls back but it is only to leverage himself against the wall to push past her if she gives him need to, always looking for one of his escapes.</p><p>“I’d like to if we can ever escape this night.”</p><p>Her scoff is all disdain, knowing the difference between liking for something to come about and staking your life to make it so is as vast as the universe is wide. “Are you actually willing to do anything to make it come about?”</p><p>Frustration sets him in motion, knocking against her shoulder as he makes her stand aside after all. “You really think my nights have been just for fun? I’m trying to get to the bottom of things here. Some of us didn’t actually come to this night with a full hand of cards already.”</p><p>She offers him nothing from her hand still, as pointed as his words and gaze are, knowing that to forfeit anything would only serve to further establish him as a player and complicate her own affairs. In the absence of a response he frowns into the middle distance.</p><p>“There are still so many answers I need. Whether for this night or beyond it…” He swipes irritably at the sweat that lingers across his face, doubling down on the line of thought the longer she leaves him to it. “I could continue to speak with Rhea. Try a different approach or a scheme or two.” He looks up long enough to meet her apathetic look, and adds more forcefully, “Maybe see how much I can get from Seteth…” He cuts himself off, brows drawing together. “But if I had to put my money on who would talk first? I think I would go with Flayn.”</p><p>“Flayn,” she says, as cool as the night and its indifference. “You believe she has all the answers you seek?”</p><p>“You can’t ignore her ties to Seteth and Rhea at least, not to mention the ongoing mystery of why anyone would even want her blood.” He runs a hand through his hair and only leaves it standing more on edge. “And you just know she’s hiding something if you ever try to pose any questions to her. It’s easy to see how she might slip up and confess more than she means to.”</p><p>“And just how far do you plan on pushing her for such an ‘accident’ to occur?”</p><p>A familiar grin flits across his countenance. “Oh, I think there’s a way it doesn’t even have to come to that. I have an idea for how we can all have a very agreeable night. After all, what does Flayn seem to want more than anything?”</p><p>“I’m sure you mean to tell me just as I have no intention of guessing,” she dryly replies.</p><p>“She wants to belong—to fit in with all of the students here and spend time with us and make friends.”</p><p>“It would seem like you two would make fine friends for each other, then,” she assails because never did she agree to a truce.</p><p>“Maybe we would,” he says, a little peevish. “But why stop with me? I say we throw a party.”</p><p>“A party,” she echoes. “That’s what your scheming amounts to? Do you mean for her to have so much fun that you’ll become instant friends and she’ll tell you everything she might be withholding?”</p><p>Careless, he waves her words off. “The point is she won’t be focused on being guarded, and her defenses are already shaky to begin with. Now, are you going to help me set up the perfect party that would have Seteth breaking out into hives or what?”</p><p>“As diverting a thought as that might be, I think I will have to decline.”</p><p>“More’s the pity, just don’t take offense when I bring the rest of your house into it.”</p><p>Her jaw locks. “There’s no reason to involve them.”</p><p>“I said a party, not a little get together. This should be an all-house affair. Besides, why deny them a night of fun? No one’s having an easy time of it right now, are they? Everyone’s stuck in a night that’s left them uneasy and on edge after all that’s happened at the monastery.”</p><p>The fact also remains that Edelgard is more than partly responsible for that malaise. Would, in truth, only bring more turmoil with the actions she would take next.</p><p>In the grand scheme of things a party means nothing. No one else besides them would even remember it, and likely it would be more for Edelgard’s own misguided desire for absolution than anything else. And yet when put in the terms of doing something for her housemates, even under these circumstances, there lies some appeal...</p><p>“And you’re convinced you can make a worthwhile night of it?”</p><p>He grins. “Have a little faith in me, oh great heretic.”</p><p>Her lack of belief proves warranted though, his plan not coming together with the ease he expects. All he has to do is inform Lorenz of the endeavor before he must then contend with all of Lorenz’s unsolicited opinions on how to properly pull off the affair. The best answer becomes playing him off Ferdinand who immediately has his own deluge of suggestions to declare, the two of them perfectly neutralizing the other. Edelgard leaves them with the idea of producing some kind of musical entertainment and Claude seems appreciative of her initiative until he hears the product of Lorenz and Ferdinand’s collaboration.</p><p>“A bit stuffy,” he grouses, “but better than nothing.”</p><p>Dorothea comes to be a far better ally, more than amenable to rounding up others to join in the affair. Among those who did not wish to participate, Bernadetta is their greatest challenge, unwilling to be moved no matter how they entreat her. Edelgard can feel a little more ire bleed into her words with each attempt she makes, forced to acknowledge the greater futility of the scheme she’s partaking in, but she is not prepared for how invested Claude becomes in the dilemma.</p><p>“Anything you’d like to be there?” he tries. “I promise we can make it happen.”</p><p>“N-no need, really,” Bernadetta says from behind her still intractably closed door, and somehow Claude appears more defeated than when Edelgard had put a blade to his throat.</p><p>“Why are you so insistent with her?” she challenges, just as cutting as she’d been then.</p><p>At first she thinks he will not rise to meet her, or worse, return to the deflection that is always his wont. Instead, when he finally looks away from Bernadetta’s room he exhales and admits, “There’s actually a part of her that reminds me of myself.”</p><p>“Yourself?” she asks, immediately fixating upon this new incongruous piece of information. “You could not be any more different.”</p><p>His expression wavers as though trying to settle on something between earnest and glib, and when he speaks his tone is also uneven. “Believe it or not, I’ve also had my moments where I’ve struggled to leave my room. Sometimes the world seemed too—” He pauses, considering the night at large. “Cruel and unforgiving.” His eyes lift, finding the night’s constellations. “Overwhelming.”</p><p>“And yet, here you are,” she responds, studying the striking profile he casts against the sky’s brocade. As he swallows she tracks the movement along his neck.</p><p>“Because there was still someone on the other side of that door who wanted me to come back out.” Claude drops his head, shaking it, then scuffs his foot against the ground. “It would be good to see her get out a little, too.”</p><p>On this matter, Edelgard cannot relate. Never did she have the luxury of waiting for someone to call upon her. There’d been no choice but to force herself back out into the world, regardless of what it cost her. She could not stay behind with all she’d lost; she had to move forward, and that—that impossibility was the worst of this night’s torment.</p><p>From the treetops a breeze whispers, breathing tentative life into her as it scatters her hair about her face. “There’s nothing that compares to the open air,” Edelgard says at last, half senselessly. The only reply she can find within her to produce.</p><p>Claude stirs the air itself as he turns towards her, clearly waylaid by a new idea. “You’re right. We’ll hold our party right out back from the dormitories. That way Bernadetta can join in from her room as she likes.”</p><p>It’s an inarguably thoughtful plan and so Edelgard willingly goes along with it, asking Caspar to haul some chairs out as Claude pesters Lysithea to drop her studies with Annette so that they might conjure up some fire to stave off the cold. It goes wrong almost immediately, Annette tripping mid-spell over a chair Caspar has set out and both the piece of furniture and Caspar’s hair promptly go up in flames. The next go around, Edelgard swiftly intercedes, drawing Annette much further away so that she might not cause anyone accidental harm and they soon have a few, more innocuous, fires going.</p><p>“One other way to warm up,” Claude muses, and Edelgard wonders if it’s not some innuendo until he adds, “I say we repurpose Manuela’s alcohol for the night. She’s out on a date anyway. She won’t miss it.”</p><p>Edelgard raises a brow at him. “Until she comes back and wants to drink herself into a stupor?”</p><p>“Then we’re doing her favor, really. Everyone wins.”</p><p>Hilda gets the assignment, sleeves actually rolled up for the mission at hand. “Now this I think I can handle,” she says, winking. “We’ll be enjoying ourselves in no time.”</p><p>In Hilda’s wake, Edelgard lays out her surmise. “So your plan is to get Flayn drunk.”</p><p>He shrugs. “Hey, I’m just assuring that everyone who wants to drink is going to have the chance. That’s all.”</p><p>To that end he entrusts Raphael and Ignatz with the transportation of a cask of mead up from the village, Claude smoothly talking over Ignatz’s obvious uncertainty. Raphael, for his part, is more than willing, already halfway to the gates before Claude can even hand over the gold pieces to Ignatz.</p><p>That just leaves them with the matter of food, an issue that Claude takes very seriously.</p><p>“You and your feasts,” Edelgard comments dully.</p><p>“Hey, we’ll always remember the one after Gronder Field, won’t we? Even softened the blow of defeat, didn’t it?”</p><p>Edelgard had been in no true spirit for revelry then, being served a reminder of her own shortcomings in battle when so many more lay ahead to fight. Even so, she cannot deny that she has a few brighter recollections from that night, Bernadetta there among the rest of her house, laughter and comradery shared freely. Their words, she’s largely forgotten, but not the feeling. “It was not your worst idea,” she allows and he snorts softly in gratitude for the compliment paid.</p><p>A truer feast tonight is beyond them, though it’s not for want of trying. Petra and Leonie offer up their services to catch and roast some fish. Annette, meanwhile, declares their need for Mercedes, and with a glint in her eye, Mercedes takes over, enlisting Ashe and Dedue to help prepare a real meal and dessert.</p><p>All told, it takes three nights to arrange something that Claude deems worth remembering—if it were even possible for anyone but the two of them. On the fourth they actually approach Flayn, and that proves the easiest step of all. The invitation is offered out of careful earshot, and Flayn brightens immediately.</p><p>“What fun,” she whispers conspiratorially. “I am so very excited to partake in your secret soiree. I shall sneak out when the time is right and meet you behind the dormitories.”</p><p>“Need any help with the sneaking part?” Claude asks, lips upturned.</p><p>Flayn trills a laugh behind her hand with a touch of hubris that is more amusing than not. “I assure you, I’m more than capable of handling myself.”</p><p>When she does arrive as promised, it is with her fullest airs until Annette latches on to her, pulling her into the fray. Claude, in contrast, makes no move to bridge their distance, seemingly content to stand back and observe. Facing down Edelgard’s barbed stare, he merely says, “I think I’ll give her one night without any meddling. Tomorrow I can swoop in.”</p><p>“I thought you wanted answers, Claude,” she says, irate at the prospect of dragging this social experiment out any longer than need be when already she has such low expectations for it.</p><p>“I do,” he argues back, “but let’s just give ourselves and everyone one night. We know how to pull everything off by now. It’ll be easy to redo.” His attention moves over Edelgard’s shoulder, smiling slyly at the sight of Flayn heartedly chugging some mead alongside Leonie and then making a show of wiping her mouth clean with a satisfying sigh.</p><p>“Would you look at that? She went right to helping herself.”</p><p>Edelgard cannot entirely hold back a mocking tone. “Do you expect me to congratulate you? You left it entirely up to luck and chance that she’d play into your scheming. It’s the approach only an opportunist would take.”</p><p>He huffs out a laugh that borders on the incredulous. “This whole party was my idea and I helped arrange it. Or did you not live through those nights with me? I created the opportunity.”</p><p>The sound she produces, in contrast, is wholly without mirth. “Outside this night, the world would not wait upon your hesitation. If you really wanted your answers, you should go and get them.”</p><p>“Right. Sorry this isn’t on the level of just jumping right in and beheading someone.” His mouth goes taut, pulling into a thin line, but he just as soon draws back, the tension on his end diffusing in that natural way of his. “I think maybe it’s us that needs a drink to properly join in the spirit of things.”</p><p>She is not looking to join in herself, but she does accept the drink he holds out to her, even standing by as he clinks their cups together in false fellowship. Once again she frowns at him as the froth of her drink spills over her cup’s rim and onto her boots. He shrugs, helpless and unapologetic, and she retains her glare as she takes a swig, chasing down the intractable dread that is gnawing in the pit of her stomach. She does not entirely suppress her distaste.</p><p>“Not a big fan of mead?” he teases as he takes a sip of his own drink, mouth pulling as well. “I’m more of a wine person myself, but you know: whatever’s on offer and gets the job done.”</p><p>Its effects are clearly already working upon their classmates, judging by the racket that ensues. Claude has to make a last minute appeal to Marianne to help silence the sound, but it still carries enough through the dormitory that Byleth wakes briefly, peering out and shaking their head, before retreating inward again. Linhardt, a firmer holdout to the festivities, is finally drawn out of his own room, complaining of the noise and the interruption to his studies. He still finds a quieter spot beside Lysithea, indulging with her as Mercedes keeps them readily supplied with sweets.</p><p>The staid music Ferdinand and Lorenz offer up on violin and flute becomes more frenetic as well, the more drinks they indulge in on the side, and Annette spins tipsily in delight, dragging Flayn into a senseless dance of their own making, tripping over themselves and smothering their laughs into each other’s shoulders.</p><p>Caspar and Raphael somehow devolve into drunken sparring, Caspar’s Thunderbrand replica making an unexpected appearance, and from their chaos Edelgard moves her attention towards her other house members, trying to discern how they are finding the night. By all appearances, at least Dorothea and Petra seem to be enjoying themselves, if not quite as sociable as she’s sometimes seen them. Still, they spend time both together and apart, intermingling between the houses, and as Petra chats with Cyril—another reluctant addition to their party that Claude had insisted upon—Petra makes a point to stop by Bernadetta’s slightly ajar window to offer up various refreshments. Hesitantly, Bernadetta accepts, and slowly the window opens a little further, the better for her to peer outward and observe.</p><p>Claude remains the proverbial life of the ongoing party, making his rounds and now joining Ashe and Dedue as they stand over an open flame, cooking still. Claude helps himself to everything as soon as it’s prepared, chatting amicably with Dedue until Edelgard sees some levity cross even his serious face.</p><p>But there is no levity to be found for Edelgard and neither, it would seem, for Dimitri, who ends up hanging as much upon the periphery of the party as she does. Listlessness takes her to her feet, circumventing those who would try and engage her, resolved in the fact that this night is not for her, and when she nears Dimitri it is only to step back into a lingering tension that Edelgard does not quite know how to explain. Well into the school year the two of them had been able to keep up their polite, if reserved, exchanges. Never friendship, of course, but the expected cordiality between two future leaders.</p><p>In the days leading up to this particular night had begun, however, things had shifted in their limited interactions, the two of them taking up a seemingly mutual aloofness. Perhaps just an instinctive response to all the circumstances developing around them and not one to be overthought.</p><p>Regardless, Edelgard has no intention of bridging that distance now, there being nothing that she owes him. She merely nods at him in acknowledgment and turns away again, back to the despair that snakes its way along her spine and coils tightly around her heart. In her drink at least she finds a kind of bitterness to match the feeling, the edges of her jagged thoughts dulling ever so slightly as she watches the night unfold and then come undone, people beginning to drag themselves to bed.</p><p>She catches the glint of Claude’s gaze and is unsurprised to find it honed upon Flayn, laid out in a corner with a cat curled up at her ankle. The cat is already snoring softly when Edelgard approaches, and Flayn does not seem to be far behind, eyelashes brushing against the rise of her cheeks.</p><p>She marks Edelgard’s arrival with one last fleeting glance before her eyes shut fully. “Oh, I’m so drowsy,” she mumbles into the crook of her elbow. “It really is quite true, the somnolent effects of alcohol. I loathe to sleep, but it’s a little easier here like this with everyone…”</p><p>The rise and fall of her chest evens out, sleep overtaking her, and when Edelgard looks back up from her prone form, Claude is beside her again, glowing with an incandescence to rival the stars. Merely the effect of inebriation, she rationalizes, seeing his cup still held in a loose grip. He raises it to the flush of his face, the heightened brightness in his eyes turned towards the sky once more. Above them the stars burn on, defiant in the face of the nearing snowfall.</p><p>For a breath, a different, less charged, undercurrent runs between them, the subsuming hush that always precedes the snow now blanketing them both. Into it Claude murmurs, “People around the world look to the stars to divine their lives and find their paths.” His eyes close as if in thought and when they reopen he is peering directly at her. “Would you believe they held the answers? Or would you say it’s people who give meaning to them?”</p><p>“So this is what you’re like with a drink in you.” She looks pointedly downward, back to her halfway refilled cup, her own hand aching from the grasp she’s held it in all night.</p><p>He makes a comical face, one that is all exaggerated affront. “Hey, I’m always full of deep thoughts and questions.”</p><p>“Yes, proof that even alcohol cannot make you any more tolerable.” Equally intolerable are the stars that pierce even the surface of her drink, and in her own small act of defiance she raises her chin against their distant fire.</p><p>“Do you really have to even ask?” she finally answers. “The latter, of course. People relinquish control over their own lives, taking the easier out, and assign the stars meaning even when they should not.”</p><p>He hums contemplatively, then trains his unnerving gaze back upon the night sky. “I do believe in people leading their own lives, but maybe there are just some things beyond people’s power of comprehension, no matter how hard we try to grasp them. I can sympathize with looking for meaning elsewhere when there are things you don’t actually understand.”</p><p>Edelgard can read it as no less than submission to whatever it is they’re facing, and the resulting disconcertment that comes takes her by surprise. On her tongue slicks the taste of despair, precluding any response. Again, she pulls from her cup, trying to displace it. A drop of mead gets the better of her, catching on her chin, and abrasively she swipes it away.</p><p>“Those sound like nothing but the words of a defeatist,” she declares.</p><p>“It’s human nature though,” he says, unchastised. “Just take this night. The less it makes sense, the easier it is to imagine it could be some kind of intervention on a greater power’s part. One open for interpretation.”</p><p>“An intervention,” she states but means it as a question.</p><p>He captures his lip between his teeth, but eventually obliges. “One that might even let me catch up and actually work things out for myself.”</p><p>“So you lose yourself in your books and mysteries with time suspended,” she says heatedly. “That reckoning hardly explains why I am also here, living the night out with you.” Time is the last thing she needs when she is already decided and settled and has only want to follow through.</p><p>His laughter is a low kindling in his chest, more stifling smoke than true flame. “Don’t ask me to explain your night for you, peerless princess. You already turned down my very heartfelt idea that it was for us to be on friendlier terms, and I obviously don’t know enough about you to suggest anything else.”</p><p>It’s another one of his useless thought exercises. One she will not entertain even if she feels as though she is nothing more than the dregs at the bottom of her cup—a far dimmer version of herself than the one she’d begun this night with.</p><p>In its next iteration it feels inevitable to wish to chase a more potent feeling, Manuela’s stronger liquor bringing a fire to her throat. It warms her insides over, too, as she takes in Claude’s attempt to produce his much sought after answers, and it’s his obvious struggle that draws her closer, Flayn not quite as loose-lipped as he’d flung his hopes on.</p><p>By her own admission though, Flayn is not immune to the effects of alcohol, no matter what she really is, and her own nerves have her frequently sipping at her drink to buy herself time. It only leaves her more defenseless, her guard naturally lowering, and Claude proves to have some actual and discerning sense about him, suggesting himself that Flayn is Seteth’s daughter. Her reaction is all that is needed for him to confirm it as the truth.</p><p>Countless other questions and theories he tries, rooted in what seems most plausible, but it’s only in observing another of Flayn’s reactions that he has his truer success, Flayn flinching as Caspar wanders nearer, brandishing his Thunderbrand replica still.</p><p>“What’s wrong? Don’t like Caspar’s nice model?” Claude asks.</p><p>“No,” Flayn demurs, cheeks bright and eyes shining, not far off from the point in the night when sleep overtakes her.</p><p>“Why not?” he insists. “I think it’s a spitting image of the original.”</p><p>Her face flushes further in actual anger. “It is a vile act to make a replica of such a thing. Absolutely horrid.”</p><p>Claude doesn’t even pause for breath, clearly sensing a lead of some note to pursue. “Why so bad? Because they’re so sacred?”</p><p>“Maybe once, but not after being so horribly twisted and used by people. I shudder every time to even think of it.” In a stupor, her head shakes from side to side. “I try not to...”</p><p>“How have people twisted them?” Claude asks, frustrated in his confusion, but Edelgard cuts in, finding fire within her still.</p><p>“Shudder at the ingenuity of humans? We twisted nothing. We made them and they are ours to use.”</p><p>Staring down the glassy-look in Flayn’s eye, Edelgard realizes she may have also overdone her imbibing.</p><p>“Ingenuity?” Flayn protests. “That is hardly the word for the worst kind of cruelty.”</p><p>The conversation is already out of hand, and instead of trying to slow it, Claude only pushes it over the edge in order to see its fallout.</p><p>“Worst kinds of cruelty,” he says, looking intently between them, and he does not have to go further than the first item on his list to produce a response, “Murder—”</p><p>Flayn’s eyes widen, slow but telling, and from her throat comes a sound as if she is choking, though her drink is held low in her lap.</p><p>“Murder,” Claude presses with more force. “Care to explain what exactly the Relics have to do with that?”</p><p>“That is—” Flayn begins, but she is floundering just as Edelgard can feel the rush of the tide at her own feet, the sensation that comes when everything begins to give way to a greater, inevitable power.</p><p>She barrels out headlong the better to meet it. To turn back what has no right to overtake her as she shores up the ground she still holds. “People made those weapons by their own hands.”</p><p>“Not exactly how the story goes, Edelgard,” Claude says, and she does not have to turn away from Flayn to feel his stare. It sears across her face like the unvarnished sun, but she is too far past his interference now.</p><p>“Then you repossess them, claiming they’re holy and are connected to the goddess.”</p><p>“They are!” Flayn continues, distraught and oblivious to all except the assertion laid down before her. From the glassiness of her eyes water overflows, speckling the high color of her cheeks. “From her and her children, slaughtered in the dead of night.”</p><p>Silence eddies between them, unrestful and threatening—a portent of worse to come. Claude is the unshakable gale that rushes in the storm, the blackened clouds breaking, his voice raised to a muted, dire pitch. “And then what? How does that lead to—” But already his thoughts are flying beyond articulation, his face capsized in horror.</p><p>In Caspar’s hands the Thunderbrand still swings, unrecognizable in structure but not in hue.</p><p>Claude works his own jaw into coherence. “Their… bones?”</p><p>Flayn is out at sea, swaying with her hushed and inebriated confession. “Their bones, their blood, their hearts. Everything.” She clutches her head, upturning the rest of her drink. “It’s all too awful to bear.”</p><p>Claude reaches for her. Speaks. More questioning?</p><p>Edelgard does not catch the words, adrift herself in mind, grappling with the growing dissonance of Flayn’s words, not quite certain of how to reconcile them against her own knowledge. She focuses on the corporeal instead, trying to reel herself back in. Feels the tense stiffness of her limbs in the cold. The weight of the jacket on her shoulders and the boots on her feet. Restrictive and too heavy, as though waterlogged and another means to drag her into deeper depths.</p><p>Flayn swims before her as though through the opacity of water, hands clasped in obvious distress now. “Oh no, I’ve ruined the party, haven’t I? This is not suitable conversation for a night of merriment. Forget I said a word.”</p><p>“Hard to forget just like that,” Claude says over the thunder of the pulse in Edelgard’s ears.</p><p>“Please, strive to do so, all the same. You must.”</p><p>Wrung out, Flayn falters, lurching forward as Claude rights her while it is Edelgard who is still in near danger of drowning, thoughts seeping past even the bulwark that is her mind.</p><p>Like a beach collapsing in on itself, her shored up truth breaks apart, allowing in a cycle of pernicious thought that eclipses all else: what does she know and how does she know it?</p><p>She knows pain, the constriction of her jacket sleeve a hand clenching against her upper arm. A voice that is as cutting as the cold metal dug into her skin, carving out a new wound.</p><p>“<em>Do you really think that your goddess exists?</em>” it says, faceless and impossible to push away. “<em>She is nothing more than a beast and we shall see if you have the will needed to destroy her.</em>”</p><p>Another moment. Another face. One she cannot forget—her uncle looming over her, Aymr at her feet. “<em>A newer Relic to replace the ones the beasts took from us.</em>”</p><p>His voice like venom churning through her as he charges, “<em>Go ahead. Show us if you are all we created you to be.</em>” Hands still shackled, she reaches for the weapon, but she never lifts it off the ground—never has the chance to wield it against him—arms too enervated.</p><p>Her mind diverts. Tries to slip away to shallower depths and the mindless lull of the calm ocean meeting sand. Forcefully, she stands as if she is an outsider in her own body, needing distance now before—</p><p>“Edelgard.”</p><p>Claude again. His eyes no longer the sun, but its reflection: the moon cast upon the darkened sea. But she does not want to be illuminated now. Not when she cannot draw her breath. Not reduced to such a state.</p><p>Her steps are her own, but not, as if all her unraveling threads extend upward and Edelgard a mere puppet on a string—everything she’s fought so hard not to be. She makes it as far as the back of the greenhouse before she finally succumbs to the feeling washing over her, falling, sinking to the ground.</p><p>She is dying. She’s met death and this is it, come for her again, but no— No, it is not, just the crueler illusion of it, her breaths staggered. She works to slow them, futilely trying to revest herself of some control, overcome by the old panic she hates more than anything. At the mercy of her mind’s own failings and powerless to do anything but suffer through it until it relents.</p><p>At some point she thinks she will be sick, and she is, her drink a mistake that leaves her retching. As it leaves her greater exhaustion rolls in, settling her more properly back in her body, churned out by the sea and washed ashore again, reduced to peering numbly skyward.</p><p>On her lips lay the brine of tears, a new indignity to bear, knowing she’d only shed them in a state of unconscious helplessness. Her teeth bear down upon her mouth until she can taste the tang of blood instead—blood that is not entirely her own but forced upon her.</p><p>In the distance she can still hear the muted murmurs of laughter coming from the dormitories, the greater spell of silence broken. A breeze creeps in, heralding the snow, as Edelgard shivers, keenly feeling the sweat that has broken out across her skin.</p><p>With all their unfettered glory, the stars continue on, and willfully, she stares them down. As if mocking, the stars wink back.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>The best part of writing a fic is you can say it’d be neat if Edelgard and Claude had a sword fight and then you can… write exactly that. You can also have Edelgard grapple with some things that she never faced in canon. </p><p><a href="https://twitter.com/_onnari">My twitter</a> for some writing updates and general edcl nonsense. Until next time.</p><p>EDIT: Please admire Vill's art from this chapter and chapter one <a href="https://twitter.com/villtura/status/1374006098353524740">in this thread</a>, alongside all the rest of her amazing art!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This chapter has gotten out of hand so please have this first section as I continue to work on the rest.</p><p>Please also note that this chapter contains graphic violence.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Eventually, time rights her. Like a fallen chess piece Edelgard is raised, slotted neatly back into her seat at the dining hall. Thrust back onto a board midgame to face down another interminable night, impossible to win no matter what play she makes.</p><p>All that’s left is the promise of defeat, and she feels the last loss keenly still, awash in its lingering panic. Ferdinand’s scrutiny, clear and immediate, proves too much now, and she leans away, the better to partially obscure her face behind her raised arm and curtain of hair.</p><p>Even then she is not beyond discovery, Ferdinand angling to meet her eye until she has to make the concession to turn further in her seat, and there as if on cue is Claude, making his way over to engage her again.</p><p>Immediately, he oversteps, seating himself down beside her, but before she can even rebuke him for that action taken, he slides a plate before her.</p><p>“Some extra sweets, straight from the oven,” he says, shifting it closer still with unexpected gravitas. “You’ll feel better if you get some energy back.”</p><p>Her body locks up, spiteful heat traveling up her neck and face as she’s forced to relive the moment that she had fled from him. To confront the fact that he had played a knowing witness to her distress, proven now by how he approaches her.</p><p>When she makes no movement towards the dish, he adds, “Listen, I know a thing or two about this.”</p><p>“I know already,” she grits out, but even just that declaration sends her back to the prior night—Edelgard making equally adamant assertions, only to have those blows deflected right back at her. Flayn’s words like a lance, driven deep into those places where her armor does not quite extend.</p><p>But the longer she regards the plate, the more his words register for what they are: an admission that he might have experienced a similar state of feeling. Assessing him anew, she reaches towards the admittedly welcome change to her nightly menu. He betrays nothing else, far more invested in watching her back until they are merely staring each other down and Edelgard feels short of breath again.</p><p>There are too many thoughts vying for attention, the past returning, unbidden, and she can make sense of none of it with him breathing down her neck. She forces down one flaky pastry, then two, seeking some fleeting fortification before she pushes both plate and chair back, cutting a blazing path out of the room.</p><p>Outside, the night already has the monastery in a stranglehold, its grip unrelenting with the sun now extinguished. As the haunting glow of the rising moon falls behind cloud cover, the darkness itself reaches for her, its fingers pressing up against her throat—an indistinguishable cry falling from her lips.</p><p>How to foist it off again? How to redraw that boundary when all the pain she’d cast off into its depths has seemingly come for her at last? Vengeful, the winter wind laughs through the world’s fallen detritus, deadened leaves scattering at her feet. Nearly to the point of stinging tears it lashes her face, but no—that is still a step too far.</p><p>Just for tonight, if she could... Some kind of escape just until she could regather herself. But where to retreat from the night and everyone who would seek her within it? From even the condescension and judgment of the stars’ pointed gaze, burning holes into her back?</p><p>Moving through the dark, a different slither of light finds her. Tentative but enticing in its discretion: the candlelight that emits past the edges of Bernadetta’s closed door. A barrier that draws even the world up short.</p><p>Unconsciously, Edelgard bears her knuckles upon it—restrained enough that there might be an answer. The door does not budge, but Bernadetta’s voice does carry through it, questioning and threadbare.</p><p>“It’s just me,” Edelgard says, all her unravelling threads now tangled up with her thoughts and coherency. “I don’t have anything to ask of you just that—” The words are onerous to produce. “I might stay for a while.”</p><p>“Gah, did I do something wrong?” Bernadetta somehow still manages to reason.</p><p>“No,” Edelgard says, forehead falling forward until it rests against the wood. “I just need— I’m just looking for some place for the moment... Some place to just be.”</p><p>Her pulse pounds through her temples. One constriction of her heart, a second, a tenth.</p><p>She nearly pitches forward when the door does give way, Bernadetta’s face appearing in shadow. But the light behind her still burns warm and peaceably, inviting even. How had Edelgard never noticed how inviting it could be?</p><p>“Did something happen?” Bernadetta asks, voice small.</p><p>On the door frame, Edelgard’s hand catches. Too much. Impossible to relay it all even if she were to be believed.</p><p>But somehow, even without articulation, Edelgard conveys enough for Bernadetta to cautiously open her door further. “I s-suppose you could stay here. If you really need to.”</p><p>Hands twisting upon each other, she hovers beside the doorway, her anxiousness enough to cause Edelgard to consider that perhaps this was a mistake still. Then comes the wind, the frigid dark biting at her heels and drawing her a step further towards that room’s light.</p><p>“Don’t mind me,” she implores. “Please just go about your night and continue whatever it is you were doing as if I wasn’t here at all.”</p><p>“Well… I guess Bernie could try.”</p><p>To her bed Bernadetta recedes, hesitantly picking back up the needle and thread laid out across it. The relief that comes as Edelgard closes the door behind her is as palpable as her heart thudding in her chest, and she tries to make it last, staring down the room’s equally shuttered windows.</p><p>Below their sills a line of stuffed animals look on, each a warm and welcome presence and a reminder of what comfort Edelgard has foregone in the austere confines of her own room.</p><p>Her hand finds one without meaning to, a well-dressed bear smiling gently at her. Through her glove she cannot properly feel its texture, but still she can appreciate its softness and give in her arms.</p><p>Sinking to the ground in the corner of the room, she draws it down with her, curling upon it and herself until there is nothing beyond the circle of her arms as the previous night plagues her anew. Flayn’s confession and, more damning, her obvious distress at what she had revealed—her implicit belief in the words shared.</p><p>A perverse chill runs Edelgard through, telling her she had not been proven entirely wrong to think that humans had in fact been behind the Relics.</p><p>Did it change anything that people—that Those Who Slither in the Dark—had seemingly massacred the goddess’s children, mining their bodies for weapons and claiming them as their own? She may have spared Flayn from any darker intentions, but was Edelgard’s goal still not aligned with their own? To end Rhea’s reign the only way Edelgard knows that will keep?</p><p>Death, unequivocal and absolute.</p><p>And would it not be a just end? Rhea deserving of the punishment Edelgard would mete out—the perpetrator of such crimes against humanity still?</p><p>But to have been misused and misdirected in ways even she was not aware of...</p><p>Before her appears her uncle’s face, exultant as the Crest of Flames, The King of Liberation’s bloodline, had at last manifested within her. Along the nape of her neck is the feeling of his hand, lifting her up so that she might walk forward when she’d already consigned herself to death.</p><p><em>“We have given you this blood, this power, to burn even the beasts who defile this land,”</em> he says—her course set and begun at their behest. Other, rapacious gazes trained on her as his grip tightens, voice gone derisive. <em>“Lying to this world as they pretend to be gods, and you believing them.”</em></p><p>And them lying to her in turn, but how far? In what lies did she still put her trust?</p><p>Throughout her chest pressure builds, another cry now suppressed into the stuffed animal that she crushes in her arms. To think of herself as a mere pawn in that history of bloodshed… To come from a family that had been murdered by the same force that had massacred those she would call her enemies. Edelgard exploited and positioned in their greater, still unknown conflict, no matter how desperately she had sought her own agency.</p><p>She’d dared to believe that if she could just near her objective—to reach the other side of the chess board—that she might have promoted herself to the rank of a true queen. To take out the opposing side and then turn traitor against her own. To have finally, fully, controlled Fódlan in her own right.</p><p>Now forced to see that she had not even known all the plays that had already been made.</p><p>She has to remember to breathe—lungs burning, more panic building—but at least that she manages to control through sheer force of will, counting off both her inhalations and exhalations.</p><p>When she lifts her head at last to draw a freer breath, it’s to realize Bernadetta has already dropped off on her bed, strewn amidst her sewing.</p><p>There is no such respite for Edelgard, her thoughts still spiralling, and under her breath she begins a mantra of what she still holds on to as unfailing, driving truth—enumerating the Church’s many evils as a means to steady herself. As the bells of dusk toll, Edelgard brought back to the dining hall once more, she finds it is enough to face another night.</p><p>To face those who await within it.</p><p>Rather than simply lie in wait for their next, inevitable encounter, Edelgard rises to dictate its course, hunting Claude down first.</p><p>It’s at the edge of the audience chamber that she finds him, Rhea once again the obvious focus of his attention. She gives him no opening to speak or deflect, simply grabs him by the arm and maneuvers him down the hall. Not until she’s sequestered him into the Captain’s Quarters does she loosen her hold, resoundingly shutting the door behind them.</p><p>He raises his brow at her, idly rubbing the spot she’d grabbed him by. “A little handsy, aren’t we? If you wanted my undivided attention so badly, all you had to do was ask.” But she can tell she has unnerved him by the way his smirk goes a little lopsided, his eyes darting between hers.</p><p>It is an improvement, at least, over how he’d looked at her the past two nights. His eyes too discerning as Edelgard played the helpless fool before him. But not now. Not here.</p><p>“The Church has done irrevocable harm to Fódlan,” she says, reaching for the words that had seen her through to this dusk—the point she needs established most of all. If she could have it answered by him now in spite of what they had heard from Flayn’s lips, to even use it to regain some manner of control between them...</p><p>“Sure,” he responds before her litany can begin in earnest.</p><p>She frowns at the interruption, trying for momentum. “Manipulated the people of Fódlan for their gain.”</p><p>Immediately, he edges in, “Kept people ignorant.”</p><p>“Divided this land,” says Edelgard.</p><p>Closer in, he leans, nearly eye level with her. “Set people against each other.”</p><p>Head on, they face each other, their stance opposing if not for their speech. The unnerving excitement of that rapport taking her higher and then closer to a defining precipice as she delivers, “It is the greatest threat, the most entrenched in every facet of society. The root cause and perpetrator behind the nobility and its unjust, inimical Crest system.”</p><p>Her voice catches, too much uncontrolled passion held within it, and his expression shifts almost imperceptibly, a shadow playing across it. Then that penetrating look of knowing, Claude seeing the truth of this conversation for what it is: Edelgard telling him as much as she is telling herself—seeking confirmation, even reassurance.</p><p>She waits for him to cut her down for the vulnerability, for the crushing fall that awaits now that she has climbed to such heights with him. Instead, Claude willingly gives her what she seeks. Her gaze held in his, he agrees, “Yes.”</p><p>But because it is still him—never one to be able to stop with his questioning—he leaves her suspended atop that height still, asking of her, “Why were you so convinced that people had made the Relics themselves? I haven’t heard or read anything to even suggest it.” His eyes narrow. “Where are you getting your information from?”</p><p>She allows a moment to go by as she draws a short breath, relieving the burning tension in her chest. “When you have such close connections to the continent’s oldest nation state, all manner of things reach you.”</p><p>“And you don’t question them at all? You just accept them at face value?”</p><p>She recognizes the restraint he’s brought to this conversation only now that he casts it aside, giving way to open frustration.</p><p>His voice is trenchant enough that it draws blood—up to her face that heats and through her thundering veins. “Even Flayn’s own incredible account is just begging to be picked apart. What is she even talking about, children of the goddess? The fact that they existed in the first place, let alone were massacred to make Relics—”</p><p>He cuts himself off, eyes trained on a spot over her shoulder, biting hard at his lip in thought. With his gaze relented, she slowly builds herself up again.</p><p>“You want your answers, Claude,” she says sharply into the taut silence, and he looks back to her, the tendon in his neck straining. “But are you truly willing to fight for them?”</p><p>“More fighting?” He nearly scoffs. “Who now? You again?”</p><p>Edelgard's deliverance is nothing short of an executioner's notice.</p><p>“Rhea.”</p><p>At first he gives her nothing in response, his face still and expressionless. When the awaited reaction does come it is dubious and lilting. “What? Another one of your ‘Edelgard kills Rhea for the hell of it’ adventures? Not confident you can handle her alone this time?”</p><p>“No,” she snaps. “This is me revealing what I know about her.”</p><p>His jaw goes slack, finally rendered speechless by her. He swallows, hands flexing at his side, and finally says, “Okay... Okay, if there are really answers to be gained...”</p><p>“We’ll corner her somewhere,” Edelgard continues, dead set and determined now that she’s made up her mind and already envisioning their approach. “Perhaps simply in her room after she retires for the night. It will be close quarters, but she’ll have less free range herself. From there we have to attack like we mean to end her life. She absolutely needs to feel threatened.”</p><p>His arms fold, undiverted. “And aren’t you going to try to end it?”</p><p>“At that point, Rhea’s death would be a simple matter of self-preservation. You would seem rather partial to those.”</p><p>Greater unease grips him, his body tensing. “What’s going to happen?” he presses. “Why not just tell me what you know?”</p><p>“Some things are better seen,” she tells him and Edelgard is in fact burning to see it now. To see for herself just how far the lies fed to her might extend, though surely not... Not this far. She shakes her head, an exacting measure. “But we will not see it unless we stage a decisive attack.”</p><p>His brows draw low, his eyes hooded as he stares back at her, the tension still building between them until, suddenly, Claude breaks it by taking an unexpected moment’s reprieve in levity. Fast and loose, he smiles. “So in the end you’re relying on me for a scheme or two.”</p><p>Even offset, she answers as if by rote—caught up as always in the instinctive back and forth between them. Voice almost arch, she says, “We shall see what your scheming really amounts to.”</p><p>But even he cannot stave off the gravity of the situation for long, Claude the first to frown again, his face creasing. “Edelgard,” he says. “Why now?”</p><p>For all her directness in bringing him here and steering this conversation, she struggles not to falter under his regard now, subject to what he must still be thinking of her. Laid bare as misguided, or worse, ignorant. But she must have at least this much right and she could prove it. She would.</p><p>“Intelligence for intelligence,” she settles on. “I am merely repaying a debt due.”</p><p> </p><p>***</p><p> </p><p>It’s the dead of the following night that oversees their next move, the two of them slipping silently amongst the shadows as they make their way through the monastery’s main keep.</p><p>First, the matter of eliminating possible interference, Claude calling for restraint where none need be on this night without consequence. Still, Edelgard stays her hand with his eye upon her, merely rendering her targets unconscious as Claude unveils a poison dart.</p><p>“Low grade,” he claims, but the soldiers on duty that he aims it against fall neatly to the floor. Without faltering, they pick their way over the bodies, winding their way at last to Rhea’s door. Its seal glimmers only faintly, not yet restored so soon after Rhea has passed through.</p><p>In the end it is almost too easy for Edelgard to knock past that last physical barrier. Down to the floor her axe clobbers it, wooden shards cutting through the air, and then, there, at the center of the room—Rhea, momentarily stunned.</p><p>Before Edelgard can cut down the distance remaining, an arrow hisses past her face. An attack that is quick enough that it sinks, undeterred, into the archbishop’s side. Crying out, Rhea raises her hands, a Faith incantation already in the air.</p><p>“Child, you dare to—”</p><p>Bluntly, Edelgard drives her axe forward until Rhea lands with a shuddering crack against the floor, then slams her foot down against Rhea’s hand as she lifts it to attempt another spell. The frailer bones of Rhea’s fingers snapping under the force of her heel, Edelgard lines up her weapon for a finishing blow.</p><p>It would be so easy to end Rhea’s life. To cleave her head from her sanctimonious body once more. Instead Edelgard lets the moment endure, Rhea struggling against her in an attempt to cast a new spell. Edelgard only pins the still free hand under the crushing head of her axe, Rhea’s exclamation of hurt a welcome and dizzying rapture.</p><p>A touch, sobering and insistent, comes at her shoulder—grounding her again as she hears her name murmured, careful and circumspect, on Claude’s tongue.</p><p>Rhea’s voice is not so composed, pitching higher and more strident. “You vile, tempestuous sinners,” she shouts until they are more than just words but a mutilated roar that knocks Edelgard off balance. “You will repent with your death.”</p><p>Claude’s grip falls to Edelgard’s arm, dragging her back, but he is not quick enough as Rhea’s body contorts and then expands until it takes up nearly the entire room, splintering the furniture and throwing them both up against the wall.</p><p>At first, just the euphoria of tangible proof. Then the pain that overrides it, a head wound already streaking blood through her hair. But though her vision spots, there is no mistaking Rhea’s true and monstrous form. The one she’s expected. The one she’s staked everything on—</p><p>“What the fuck,” Claude realizes. “The Immaculate—”</p><p>Rhea snaps her wings wide and against the wall they’re slammed again, but even so Edelgard has not forfeited what she holds, axe still at the ready.</p><p>There is no wanting for a target, so surrounded. She merely swings it forward in the space available, hacking away at the edge of Rhea’s wingspan until it shrinks back, and in the opening afforded to them, Edelgard recognizes that Claude has already slipped away, gone from the room entirely.</p><p>Abandoning her and the fight, Edelgard thinks with contempt until suddenly he reappears through the doorway, crouched low with bow and arrow—the flinthead ablaze.</p><p>“Get down!” he yells and that’s the only warning she has before he tosses something small and tightly wound into the room. She drops to the floor as he unleashes his lit arrow behind it. Around her the room goes shockingly white, a crack of sound followed by a residual ringing until Rhea’s roar pierces it again, the front of her hide blackened and charred as offshoots of fire take hold across the room.</p><p>“Not so immaculate now, are we?” he calls, running his mouth off even now.</p><p>Still reeling, Rhea does not hesitate to retaliate, lashing through the open doorway. Its stonework crumbling and giving way to her foreleg, she ensnares Claude before he can evade her. A quick flash of metal comes to nothing as Rhea drags him back into the room, hurtling him into the bookshelf that is now set aflame. He no sooner rebounds onto the floor than her claws find him again, piercing legs and abdomen clean through.</p><p>It’s his scream that summons Edelgard back to her feet, slipping across the floor and underneath Rhea’s hulking figure to slash her axe into the leg that lifts Claude off the ground. The attack at least registers, marked by Rhea’s low rumble of pain, but the true blow is not hers to claim as Rhea draws Claude up nearer to her face.</p><p>Metal flashes again, this time more clearly: a sword raised above his head. Two-handed, he flips it downward and spears it straight into the pale film of Rhea’s eye—then further still.</p><p>With Rhea’s howl, Edelgard moves more freely through her blind side, and into the beast’s seared underbelly—that place where neck meets body—she launches her axe. Rhea shudders, her raised claw crashing back down, and with it comes Claude, striking the ground under the full brunt of her weight.</p><p>Edelgard does not remit or falter with her objective so close at hand. Over and over her axe tears deeper into Rhea’s hide, each blow reverberating through until, at last, green ichor begins to pour forth. Her hands, her arms, her face it coats so that each swing of her weapon is more difficult than the last, her grip slipping as desperately as she tries to hold on—to strike just once more.</p><p>A rumble ferments through Rhea’s body, her maw open and extended. A forewarning of attack even in these close quarters where it is guaranteed to harm them both. Edelgard never allows Rhea the chance. When she swivels her head round to level the assault, Edelgard plants her axe clear through the end of her snout, lodging it shut as she connects with bone.</p><p>Blundering, Rhea maneuvers with what sight and space she has, her talons grazing enough along Edelgard’s side to ribbon her flesh as easily as cloth, red and green sickly intermingling across the floor. But even crying out in pain, Edelgard still works, slashing her axe against the bloody base of the beast’s neck.</p><p>Rhea’s tail curtails the onslaught, lashing out wildly, and with its blow goes Edelgard’s weapon, falling from her grip at last. With the next lashing of the beast’s tail, Edelgard, too, slams against the bookshelf as it burns, the flames a torment against the gashes that run the length of her body. She strangles on the scream that she bites down, defenseless in the wake of Rhea’s fury—if not for her need to witness Edelgard’s demise.</p><p>Before Rhea can fully contort her neck around, Edelgard latches onto the sword still struck through Rhea’s unseeing eye, driving it in with her full force so that Rhea bodily spasms. Edelgard only withdraws the attack then so that she might stab the sword in again, this time further still until it disappears up to the hilt—piercing through Rhea’s eye, the nerves beyond, and then the softer, most vital tissue encased inside her skull.</p><p>From the wound more ichor issues, brought forth by Edelgard’s hands—the hands of a killer once more, taking the life she was always meant to take—as Rhea writhes and then, finally, topples.</p><p>An entire world order falling at Edelgard’s feet if not for the inevitable collateral that fells her alongside her quarry, her lower half caught beneath the frame of Rhea’s slain body.</p><p>This scream there is no swallowing, her legs giving way and shattering. Pinned into place, her arms useless to free herself. Pain, the only thing that is left except—</p><p>“Claude,” she remembers, heart palpitating.</p><p>No answer.</p><p>Three bodies strewn across the floor, but hers is the only one still moving.</p><p>In her periphery hovers the hazy outline of Claude’s prone form. Too close—too near to another memory that threatens to overwhelm her now.</p><p>“Claude,” she says again, fighting for controlled breath. “You never... cease talking. Do not start now.”</p><p>Without relent, without surrender, the greater silence soldiers on, and again, more desperate and urgent, she combats it. <em>“Claude!”</em> she shouts. <em>“Are you with me?”</em></p><p>Just the fire sounds, raging now.</p><p>Her head falls sideways, already knowing it to be a mistake as the crushed remnant of his body, once so animated and so lively, comes into full view. More a smear of bone and blood against the floor than a person—but his hand—his hand still whole and extended.</p><p>“Fuck,” she lowly cries out, powerless against the nausea that surges through her chest as she shuts the sight out behind eyes tightly closed. Still, his death looms, so wrongly reverberating, like bone gnashing against bone. But his hand. His hand almost beckoning, through the smoke’s rising tide of darkness—</p><p>“El—” calls the past, and the archbishop’s room becomes the prison of her youth, Edelgard held immobile alongside her siblings.</p><p>“El—” Her youngest brother, Warin. “El—” The call too long unheeded and then—</p><p>She shudders even as her hand reaches, unbidden, trying to cross that final, impossible distance with life already extinguished. Warin as removed from her in body as he is in spirit, the two of them chained into place beyond any possible contact.</p><p>No, not Warin. Not him, she tells herself forcibly, mind panicking, tears stinging across her face. Claude. Claude, dead. Beside her yet still insurmountably apart, her hand closing on nothing but ash as it strains across the floor.</p><p>From her wounds blood still flows. A mercy now, as she goes more lightheaded, fire her only source of light even as it runs rampant and undiscerning, bringing pain with illumination. Through the clouds of smoke she still catches the vaulted ceiling of the room and, senselessly, she wishes for the open sky—even the stars—before the fire takes her.</p><p> </p><p>***</p><p> </p><p>The sun returns, but only to gasp its dying breath.</p><p>Edelgard gasps for air alongside it, all but screaming to still feel the fire. No resurrection by flame, just the residual trauma as her arms try to put out the memory of the blaze across her body.</p><p>But no flame and no ichor, either. Just the dining hall, Ferdinand hovering close with perhaps more concern than she’s ever seen from him, eyebrows pinching together. “Edelgard—” he begins.</p><p>Her hand clatters against the table. “No,” she says, choking on just the syllable, her lungs full as if by smoke.</p><p>Her legs shift in place and even that movement takes something from her, as restored as they appear. She tests them as she stands and then nearly falls headfirst into the table. Ferdinand reaches for her, but she evades him, standing anew. She takes a step, then two, then several, grasping upon anything she can find along her path so that she might meet the sun in the sky before the night smothers it out completely once again.</p><p>On the steps outside the dining hall she collapses. Through the tears caught upon her lashes the light refracts, Edelgard turning her face up to feel the sun’s faint and warm caress until, inevitably, it dissipates, turning the sky to ash.</p><p>Ash... slipping through her fingers, her arm reaching out. The body splayed before her. The hand—</p><p>Panic comes for her again, closing up her throat. Her breaths a labor as pressure only compounds in her chest. Back to her feet she staggers, legs as fragile as glass to remember the visceral sensation of how they’d shattered.</p><p>Just a lingering torment of the mind, no longer real, she tries to command herself, the pain and the danger now past. Still she decamps like there is danger present yet, her uneven steps taking her unconsciously across the monastery—back into its main keep where what has been wrought might be overwritten. Guards roving, Rhea officiating in her audience chamber, but Claude?</p><p>No sign of him as she crosses the library’s threshold, his place amongst his books abandoned. Heart lurching, her body follows suit, stumbling forward without anything to counteract that last vivid image of him that resurfaces until, finally, a hidden but familiar flash of color dawns. Claude’s cape betraying him in the recess that he’s folded himself into, knees drawn up to his chest and head tucked between them. His shoulders heave, his breath more audible the nearer she approaches.</p><p>The furthest sight from which to draw assurance.</p><p>“Claude,” she says, even that single word wavering as it escapes her, her legs giving out underneath her.</p><p>Against the floorboards she catches herself, arms hanging upon the suspended silence as she waits for some kind of repartee still. Not even a response comes, just a tremor that runs the entire length of Claude’s body, and in it she recognizes the worst kind of all consuming panic.</p><p>Again, she sees him splayed out across Rhea’s floor, imagining the agony and then the trauma of repossessing a body so completely devastated.</p><p>“Claude,” falls from her lips, this time with greater intent.</p><p>His head raises a fraction, the glimpse of an eye peering out at her, but with none of its usual power of perception. Dimly, his gaze crosses her own, and for a protracted moment he only reaches for words, unable to shape them.</p><p>What he finally manages, surprises.</p><p>“Did you make it out?”</p><p>She swallows, and even that movement is somehow painful, all her suffered wounds drawn back out to the forefront of her consciousness. “None of us did.”</p><p>With his exhalation comes a small and snuffed out hint of laughter, his head lowered once more. “At least the explosive didn’t get you.”</p><p>Not the explosive, no, just its fire. And yet looking upon him now, she decides to spare him for the first time.</p><p>Without purchase, her hands clench against the wooden floor. “Would that have been such a trial?”</p><p>Another muffled approximation of laughter, his actual expression unknown. “Didn’t exactly enjoy watching you die the first time around.”</p><p>“Instead that privilege was mine,” she responds, but even as she says the words she knows they are the wrong ones. Blighted and lifeless, they only make him seize up again, drawing further away from her into another silence that is too resounding to bear.</p><p>It falls to her to fill it as the candles burn lower amongst the library’s light fixtures—too inviting to the familiar spectre of death that stares back out from the deepening shadows. A reminder of all she’s lost to its depths and Edelgard powerless to still her body under its gaze, shivering there upon the floor. In its wake, she stares down what is tangible: Claude, drawn up before her, face still obscured.</p><p>She cannot inquire after him as he has already done with her, cannot ask if he is well when clearly he is not. There, a part of her only wants to empathize—to dwell on how incapacitated she also feels, pushed to the brink with neither existence nor death any relief or answer.</p><p>“You would not have been my choice to endure this night with,” she informs him instead, emotion smoldering through no matter how she tries to stamp it out.</p><p>But perhaps it is that imparted degree of feeling that produces a response, the vivid green of Claude’s eyes remerging to meet hers even as his own overspill with latent tears; her voice shakes to see them track down one side of his face. “But for there to be someone else still—”</p><p>Surrendering the words, her jaw locks into place, bracing herself for his gaze to regain its full force and focus. For him to regard her too closely again and potentially see too much, endangering her remaining defenses.</p><p>But he does not pick her or her words apart, too concerned with piecing himself back together. Slumping backwards, he crooks an arm over his eyes, his breaths deep and concerted enough that he struggles to get the words out past them. “I’ve gotten so close to death…” he says, “so many times before. But to actually—”</p><p>“Do you regret seeing for yourself?” she says when it’s clear he will say nothing more. “There was no better way to make clear Rhea’s deception. To show you what a threat she really is.”</p><p>“Well, you sure showed me,” he says, and where she expects only wryness, she instead registers defeat.</p><p>His mouth twists over upon itself, his limbs bent up at all odd angles, but it is his hand—open and listless—that brings back the worst of what she still cannot excise.</p><p>“El,” comes Warin’s voice right before the end and it’s her head that falls forward now, having to coach herself through her breaths. She does not think of Claude—does not even realize she’s speaking aloud—until she notices the timing of his own breath, synchronous to hers.</p><p>Somehow it is only then that she recalls the plate of sweets he’d extended to her in her earlier moment of weakness. She grapples with it, her mouth parting twice before she can offer, “Is there something you require?”</p><p>Faintly, he murmurs, “I think I just want to stay here and do absolutely nothing for a while.”</p><p>“Not even to question things?” she ventures, incisive, but it is less of an attack than it is an inducement. A call to action, even as her own desperation seeps through.</p><p>“Are you even in any state to answer?” he asks back, voice gone low and muted. A continued mercy towards her that she does not know what to do with. Worse, that the question is a fair one while she is still so clearly affected. But she is the one who has brought upon a revelation this time. If she cannot answer now, then when can she?</p><p>“Do not hold back on my account.”</p><p>On edge and fervent, she anticipates an immediate question, hoping for the chance to prove herself and her knowledge in light of his incessant challenges. For both his acknowledgement and concession.</p><p>“Later,” he says, and she has to swallow past the disappointment lodged in her throat. Like a leaden weight it settles in the pit of her stomach. “I’m not done doing nothing yet.”</p><p>Watching him, she watches the previous night take hold of him once more—returning her to its anguish as well if not for the single, defiant fact that he remains at a closer distance now.</p><p>Within reach.</p><p>Instinctive, it is her own hand—empty and wanting—that snakes forward and meets his in a hold to rival even death’s grip. A hold that is tight enough to make him startle, the arm across his face falling away to reveal the whites of his eyes.</p><p>“Death did not take you,” she tells him. Words she’d have given anything to deliver to her siblings—delivered instead to just her disfigured reflection in the still dusty looking glass of her bedroom. “You are here still.”</p><p>She flinches even now to remember the cold fingers, the probing assessment of the palace doctors. How she’d shut them and Hubert out so that she might fully catalog her own scars by discreet candlelight. The sobs she’d suppressed until she’d choked, her nose still running and dampening the strands of her tangled hair, limp and lifeless about her. With shaking, scarred hands she’d pushed it back to better catch the faint glimmer of her eyes.</p><p>“For the sun to rise, you will have to rise as well.”</p><p>If he catches the tremor in her voice, he does not comment, his own fingers merely stirring against hers.</p><p>“Alive,” he muses, faint and incredulous, but his grip is anything but tenuous as he grasps her hand back. White like her gloves his knuckles turn, and even through that material it is a connection both painful and real.</p><p>When had she even last held the hand of another? When had she allowed herself even the slightest trace of contact? She cannot remember, and now that she has it within her hold she struggles to let it go even as her hand begins to cramp and ache.</p><p>One moment’s delay becomes another and then an entire interval passes before she manages to imperceptibly loosen her grip. But he is the one then who will not give it up, drawing her hand nearer to his side so that her breath catches. And as the length of his arm trembles so, too, does her own.</p><p>He says nothing else, his stare as fathomless as the night sky. Seeking something more from her as death and its memory looms over them yet.</p><p>“Impossibly,” she agrees at last and holds on with that life that remains.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I joked when first drafting this that Edelgard sure is having a bad time of it. She can have another go at Rhea, as a treat! </p><p>And so, here we are.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Splitting things up once again. The chapter count is no longer set in stone, but the story itself isn’t changing, just the words required to properly tell it. Thank you for sticking with me.</p>
<p>CW: This chapter contains dissociation.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They do not speak of it, but surely they both must feel the lingering trace of each other’s touch.</p>
<p>Back in the library, finding Claude where she expects him, Edelgard, at least, cannot deny it—the imprint of his hand so visceral against her own that her arms naturally cross, her hand closing discreetly over her jacket sleeve.</p>
<p>At her approach, Claude does not have even a greeting to offer to smooth over that tension that grows anew between them. Unchecked, it subsumes even the quiet, his own hand flexing futilely against his book until at last he sets it aside to properly regard her.</p>
<p>Without any of his usual preamble he states, “So Rhea is the Immaculate One.”</p>
<p>Her boot displaces some of the books scattered before him, clearing a space for her to sit directly across, her legs at least neatly folded this time as she joins him on the floor.</p>
<p>“She always has been. She and her kind are the children of the supposed goddess.”</p>
<p>“Are?” Towards the ceiling he turns his stare. “Who else?”</p>
<p>Her jaw clenches, Edelgard resisting the impulse to bite at the inside of her cheek. Already, his questions are testing the extent of her knowledge. “There is Seteth and Flayn, at least.”</p>
<p>He takes the words in without much resistance, sitting with the idea. “That poster of a dragon in Seteth’s study…” he thinks aloud. “The book with the depiction of the Immaculate One that he confiscated. The company he keeps with Rhea. It makes sense that he’d at least be aware, not to mention Flayn was upset enough over what she told us to be personally connected to it.” He sits more upright, his words coming faster. “And then Flayn is Seteth’s daughter, her own blood highly desired... Just like Flayn said the <em>blood</em> of the goddess and her children was taken?”</p>
<p>“Yes,” Edelgard says evenly and no more, knowing she must tread carefully there, complicit as she is in those actions.</p>
<p>Seemingly none the wiser to what she is hiding from him, Claude asks, “Her Crest is Cethleann’s, isn’t it? A major one?”</p>
<p>But his mind is far from idle, Claude already jumping ahead to new conclusions that leave her breathless to keep apace. Excitedly, he scatters the books at his side, lining up quill and paper to scribble off thoughts and connections. “What did Ignatz say to me once? That Flayn gives off the feeling of Cethleann?”</p>
<p>“What are you insinuating?” Edelgard responds, cold dread lining her throat as she gives shape to the words. “That her blood is the Crest’s original source?”</p>
<p>“So your connections don’t extend that far, huh?” he comments, more offhand than not, but Edelgard is still feeling its full impact as he blusters on. “I know how it sounds, but is it really any harder to believe than what we’ve already seen? If Rhea can be the <em>Immaculate One</em> from a thousand years ago, who’s to say Flayn and even Seteth can’t also be way older than they appear? And Flayn is actually Seteth’s daughter, just like Cethleann is Cichol’s… Just a cover to further hide who they really are?”</p>
<p>With all the pieces laid out before her, Edelgard only has to wonder how she has never come to arrange them in such a manner. To think that they might all still be so closely connected, the Immaculate One and two of Seiros’s saints...</p>
<p>“Using their false religion to shape Fódlan across a millennia,” she concludes aloud.</p>
<p>“And if it’s all false,” Claude insists, “if they’re not deities, what are they? What even is the Immaculate One?”</p>
<p>“A beast,” she mouths, inaudible, and feels its inadequacy. Not answer enough. Not now.</p>
<p>“Where did they even come from and how do they live so long? That they could even exist—” Back into the receiving arms of his books he slumps, head hanging. “None of this is making any sense still.”</p>
<p>His eyes, though, lift to find hers again, compelling a response that requires her voice to work.</p>
<p>“I don’t know,” she says, feeling as if she is back atop the cliffs off Enbarr, staring down the sea and rocks that would surely tear her apart. Never the hope of flight, just the certainty of the fall.</p>
<p>“Okay,” Claude exhales, pulling her back from that precipice’s edge to stare outright at him instead, his regard as steady as the moon. “Okay. Maybe we can figure this part out, too.”</p>
<p>“‘We,’” she says, sounding out just the syllable and the thought of it.</p>
<p>Her hesitation he mistakes as another challenge, frustration fraying the edges of his words. “After everything, aren’t you even a little curious for yourself? Or are you worried about what you’ll learn? That it might not fit nicely with what you already believe?”</p>
<p>Of its own accord, Edelgard’s body locks up, unable to deny the possibility of such a discovery. Of such a fear.</p>
<p>Already, Flayn’s words had reduced her to a state of powerlessness. To knowingly tempt the chance of enduring such a thing again… But Edelgard had never been one to willingly submit to either fear or trauma. Always, she meant to rise above them.</p>
<p>“Is a position really worth taking,” Claude presses, “if it can’t weather a little opposition? Any good leader knows how to question their ground when the situation calls for it.”</p>
<p>It is only a well-meant point or perhaps even his own call to action, judging from the searching look he levels her with in the wake of his speech. Still, it is another inflicted wound upon her, exposing her for the intractable path that has taken her this far, walked in partial and unquestioned ignorance.</p>
<p>“I’m not one to run when met with opposition,” she says, just as pointed, and observes the way he also tenses. “Whatever is discovered, I can face it.”</p>
<p>A promise to herself in the end and one for him to only pay witness.</p>
<p>Across the space still between them, his head dips closer, Claude in reach once more though neither of them move to cross that line now.</p>
<p>“So you’re saying you’re in?”</p>
<p>“That would still depend,” she charges. “What are you planning?”</p>
<p>His mouth curves upward, reaching for a smaller smile that just grazes his eyes. “I’ve been thinking… Should we try Flayn again? There are more questions to ask there and at least I don’t see her resorting to killing either one of us for actually asking them.”</p>
<p>Edelgard frowns merely to remember all the coordination and clamor that had brought about that first round of questioning, even the pretense of fun too much to endure right now.</p>
<p>“No,” he says, reading her correctly this time and looking as weary as she feels. “I don’t think even I have the energy for all that right now. But maybe an exclusive, friendly gathering, just the three of us.”</p>
<p>Considering, Edelgard gives her nod and so they proceed, Flayn no less amenable to this particular invitation when approached.</p>
<p>“To be so singled out for my company,” she exclaims, hand over her heart, “I am delighted and honored to accept!”</p>
<p>To his own room Claude leads her, arguing it to be cozier for all its mess and inexplicably tries to prove his point by sitting down on one of his stacks of books.</p>
<p>“How diverting,” Flayn nonsensically declares, sitting with perfect posture on her own towering stack. Edelgard merely lifts Claude’s desk chair to emphatically resettle it facing out and decidedly ignores Claude as he bites back a grin, rolling his eyes at her.</p>
<p>“What do you say, Flayn?” he redirects, revealing another liquor bottle poached from Manuela’s store. “Fancy a drink?”</p>
<p>“Oh, yes,” Flayn says, already reaching for a cup and when all their glasses have been poured out she eagerly looks round between them, asking, “Whatever should we talk about?”</p>
<p>“Hmm,” Claude says. “I’m feeling a little nostalgic right now. Must be the cold weather and the nighttime. I feel like we should talk about our past.” He grins over the rim of his cup, taking a shot. “Some of our oldest memories, maybe?”</p>
<p>“Well…” Flayn considers, drinking along with him. “That might be quite nice.”</p>
<p>It’s to Edelgard’s surprise though that Claude actually offers to go first, and noting her reaction, Claude only turns to better include her in his address. “Since I like to run off so much, I might as well entertain you with one of the very first times I can remember.”</p>
<p>Sitting there, Edelgard struggles to reconcile the flippant delivery with the promise of a rarer concession of his past—that it would even seem to be partly given for either her amusement or benefit.</p>
<p>Conversationally, he says, “What you need to know is I didn’t exactly grow up close to a lot of other kids.” This part, at least, is surely for Flayn, Claude smiling at her in commiseration to develop some kind of rapport. “I liked them well enough, but well, they didn’t all like me.”</p>
<p>It is a hard thought to take as truth, Claude so easily inserting himself into any given situation or gathering. More likely for him to be met with a person’s time and willing regard than not and no need for any greater proof than Flayn sitting right before her, appreciatively attending upon his every word.</p>
<p>“Long story short, one time there was someone in my training exercises that I thought meant to hurt me. So, of course, I just ran.” His laugh is all dissonance, playful as he makes it. “I guess you could say I was just that scared as a kid. I ended up scaling this post and jumped onto this mare—” He rises, nearly out of his seat, to further illustrate. “She spooked and bolted, almost throwing me. I couldn’t even reach the stirrups.”</p>
<p>Again a laugh, a sound with no real weight to it. “I just held on for dear life and eventually she settled down to graze while I just sat there trembling for Gods know how long.”</p>
<p>His hands travel the length of his arms, making a show of that distress in a way that could not be more foreign to Edelgard. Less pityingly, he adds, “I’ll never forget my mother’s face when she tracked me down. She took me right into her arms and then just had me get right back on the horse, making sure I knew how to ride it as best I could and to keep it calm. We practiced until she was satisfied and I felt more confident, too.”</p>
<p>He all but bows, signalling the end of his recollection, and grins widely as he waits for his response. Wistfully, Flayn thanks Claude for the story, emotion clear upon her face. “A tale such as that invites memories of my own mother, though she is now deceased...”</p>
<p>In her chair, Edelgard imperceptibly stiffens, this a turn she had not expected and one she is poorly suited for—there being only a void within her where Claude and Flayn clearly hold something dear. It rises as a tide of nausea that stills her hand as they both imbibe in preparation of another story, Edelgard vividly recalling the unpleasant aftertaste of vomit that had anteceded their last joint conversation.</p>
<p>“I’ve always wished to be more independent, growing up with an overprotective family,” Flayn begins in earnest, “and living on the coast, I once decided to break away from my parents and take a small fishing boat out on the water, convinced I could manage on my own. But I was quite young then, you see, and I could not. I dropped the oars into the sea, and then I was adrift, the water sweeping me away.</p>
<p>“My father was besides himself in a panic, realizing I was missing.” Flayn smiles, her look growing fond. “But my mother was not. She set out straightaway, spotting me in the distance. She must have rowed out a league to get me and even brought back a haul of fish to celebrate. Back on shore, everyone hailed my mother as a great hero for the valiant rescue and catch.”</p>
<p>“She sounds incredible,” Claude offers warmly.</p>
<p>“Yes,” Flayn agrees, but there is a sadness to her now, left with only remembrance. Edelgard can only numbly turn her cup round in her hand, wondering what it might be like to have even that much. Head downturned, Flayn confesses, “I miss her greatly and like to think I might have some part of her in me.”</p>
<p>“I’m sure you do,” Claude says and Flayn accepts the encouragement, a little tipsy already in her abrupt laughter.</p>
<p>“I do not mean to be vain,” she says, flipping her hair out, “but my mother was also considered to be a great beauty and many have said that I share her looks. I hope it is so.”</p>
<p>Unconsciously, Edelgard’s eyes fall to the surface of the dark liquor she holds, trying to juxtapose herself against some willful recollection of her mother when she knows very well she has none. What she sees in her reflection instead is of her father—his chin, his nose, his brows—all drawn up in morose expression.</p>
<p>No. What is her mother’s? Her eyes? The shape of her ears? The line of her mouth? Edelgard does not remember, her reflection trembling within her grip, liquid threatening to spill over as her other hand rises, brushing against her temple—against the hair that frames her face.</p>
<p>A sudden, unknowable kind of certainty overtakes her. Yes, her hair. She’d had her mother’s hair.</p>
<p>Gone now.</p>
<p>The white strands slip through her fingers, the color of the snow that finds them at the end of each night. It blankets her now, swallowing her up like one of the heavy drifts she’d only seen in Faerghus—</p>
<p>She feels the weight of Flayn and Claude’s combined gazes before she properly registers they are still with her, Edelgard only able to guess at what they expect from her, lost somewhere in the conversation’s drift. Her mouth opens then closes. “My mother—” she hears herself say.</p>
<p>What of her? Dead or vanished in exilement and did it really matter when either fate had left Edelgard unloved and motherless? To think of a mother still, there is only the mothers of her siblings, that distance so carefully defined either by political maneuvering, pity, or condescension.</p>
<p>But the letters, Edelgard remembers. The letters she’d written when she’d come to learn to write—reaching out to her mother. Those misspellings and blotches of ink, all gone unanswered and returned to her.</p>
<p>“Yes?” Flayn prompts avidly, leaning forward, hands resting on her knees.</p>
<p>Edelgard’s words will not come, but she tries to force them, regardless. “I do not…”</p>
<p>“Oh right, sorry, Flayn,” Claude sweeps in to bridge the growing chasm of silence she herself cannot fill. “I meant to ask you—”</p>
<p>The conversation continues. Perhaps family is still the topic at hand, but Edelgard is not present for it as her mind recedes further—Edelgard little more than an observer of her own body, sitting prim yet unresponsive in her chair for an interval of time that does not register until a hand solidly clasps her knee.</p>
<p>She blinks as if through a fog, her head marginally lowering. Into better focus comes the hand, then the person she slowly traces it back to—Claude, shifted closer but turned away, chatting amicably with Flayn. A touch that might still feel incidental and forgotten if not for the way his thumb moves intermittently, the sensation all the more intimate through the fabric of her leggings.</p>
<p>By the movement of his digit she tells time, one stroke then the next the ticking hand of a clock until the room returns to her as Flayn nearly topples over in laughter.</p>
<p>With Flayn’s eyes closed in mirth, Claude’s glance shifts to Edelgard, posing a wordless question. She nods slowly, and just as slowly, he removes his hand.</p>
<p>The room is colder for it.</p>
<p>Further, she works to ground herself, minding her breaths and naming what her senses can still discern. Viscerally, she focuses on the movement of her body: the curve of her spine, the crease of her elbow, her knee—burning as she subtly shifts her foot, forward then back.</p>
<p>Around her, the conversation finds its end, Flayn’s responses mere murmurs as she fights off sleep and eventually concedes to it. In the perfect silence that descends Claude inevitably looks to Edelgard once more, holding the wrist of the hand that had grasped her knee.</p>
<p>With it empty now, he gestures towards her again, her chest tightening unconsciously. Uncertain, he asks, “Was that okay?”</p>
<p>She bites down her first response—instinctive and combative—and sits with the question instead, Edelgard searching for a truer answer, if only for herself. “It was not…” she manages, then hastens to see him look away, “too much.” She struggles for equanimity. “Given the circumstance.”</p>
<p>Towards his hand he turns, face half-hidden from her. “I just thought I’d try to return the favor.”</p>
<p>Again, she feels the solid presence of his palm against hers, his meaning immediately understood. But no, it is just her cup that she holds in this moment, her hand stiffening around it with something so tentative in the room now.</p>
<p>For once she does not find it within herself to try and cut her way through the feeling. Left unattended, though, it only grows in force until she nearly chokes on it, her tongue a blunt and useless instrument.</p>
<p>“What… what did Flayn say?” she finally voices, there being no point in pretense when her attention had so clearly not held. Rather that she could still know what she could.</p>
<p>“Not much,” he admits. “Only that she let slip one too many references to what has got to be the distant past.” His head lifts just enough for her to see his mouth quirk, a smile trying to catch with just a penetrating hint of warmth.</p>
<p>Even now, she cannot put her trust in it but neither can she let it go ignored as he says, “I was thinking it was about time to use your more direct approach again.” His eyes rise, too, meeting hers. “Are you up for another go?”</p>
<p>There is no other possible response. Unwavering, she plants her feet against the floor. “Yes,” she says and holds his gaze until she has convinced herself.</p>
<p><br/>***</p>
<p><br/>In their next attempt Edelgard is perhaps too self-aware—body willfully poised and awkward in feeling as she sits round with Flayn and Claude in his room once more. Of the room’s subtle maneuvering she is also conscious, Claude guiding the topic of conversation far from family.</p>
<p>It is yet another instance of him proving both observant and thoughtful, but rather than feeling gratitude or relief, Edelgard only tenses with unease, realizing that more and more he is coming to know what might unravel her.</p>
<p>But he has not used it against her, either.</p>
<p>Still she burns in anticipation of the possibility, her hand coming to rest over the knee where his own hand had been. Staring intently upon him now, though, he does not peer back, Claude too focused on breaking open their present conversation, Flayn inebriated enough to be smiling widely at each and everything said.</p>
<p>“You know what I’d love to hear about?” he asks her blithely. “If you could tell us something about the Church’s founding, seeing as you were around.”</p>
<p>“Oh yes, there are many tales surrounding—” Flayn pauses, then blinks, the whites of her eyes showing. “I mean, oh no. I do not know whatever you could mean.” Her laugh gets a little too far away from her. “Me? Around for the Church’s founding? Preposterous!”</p>
<p>Claude angles towards her, grinning. “Aw come on, Cethleann, don’t hold out on us.”</p>
<p>“I am not holding out—Well, wait, why are you calling me Cethleann? Why would you ever do such a thing?”</p>
<p>“Because that’s your name.” Claude shrugs. “It’s only polite.”</p>
<p>“Cethleann,” Edelgard cuts in to further back their guess while Flayn is still reeling. “We know who you are. Any denial would be pointless.”</p>
<p>“I still—” Flayn protests.</p>
<p>Just as implacable, Edelgard strikes again. “We know about Rhea and Seteth, too.”</p>
<p>“Well!” Flayn’s mouth falls open, not unlike a fish caught upon a line. Audibly, she closes it, gulping down a breath with clouded vision. “You’d be better off asking Rhea then. I founded nothing.”</p>
<p>“Rhea?” Edelgard questions, new dread growing at the implication. Claude, registering it alongside her adds, “Not Seiros?”</p>
<p>“Oh,” Flayn wonders, looking between them, “so you do not know everything.”</p>
<p>“Are you saying it was Rhea, the Immaculate One, who founded the Church?” Edelgard demands.</p>
<p>Flayn only mumbles in new, dizzying confusion, “What do you mean? They are the sa—” Soundly, she claps a hand over her mouth.</p>
<p>“The same?” Claude surmises, then flounders. “What, the same person? Being? Thing?”</p>
<p>Edelgard has no response to offer as he looks across to her now. It is yet another revelation with the pieces faintly there for her to assemble, had she had the mind to even attempt it. A revelation now that leaves her blood running cold. Blood that was Seiros’s—</p>
<p>Rhea’s.</p>
<p>Her free hand fists around the edge of her chair and for a long moment it is impossible to say who is struggling more, herself or Flayn. But this truth, at least, finds its home within her familiar ire, only able to further her vendetta against Rhea—against the Church—and secure on that end, she finds herself still present in the conversation as Flayn makes a sound that is wholly despairing.</p>
<p>“I should not have said that. I should not be saying anything.”</p>
<p>“Come on, Cethleann,” Claude entices, “don’t you want to get all of this off your chest and talk about it with someone that isn’t your dad or… aunt? Cousin? Older relative?”</p>
<p>Edelgard lets out a haggard breath of frustration as he further digresses and returns them towards the line of thought that had gotten them this far. “Cethleann, don’t you wish to make stronger ties at the Officers Academy? Sharing details of who you truly are is imperative in order to form a closer bond with someone. To achieve friendship, even.”</p>
<p>Neither the irony or poignancy of her words is lost on her, even without Claude stopping to meaningfully raise his eyebrows at her.</p>
<p>Downward, Flayn’s mouth turns as she fidgets before them. “Still, it is a risk— I should not—”</p>
<p>Edelgard response is swift, brokering no dissent. “You are talking to two of the most circumspect people you’ll ever meet in the course of your long life. We shall give nothing away.”</p>
<p>“She’s right,” Claude smoothly sidles in. “And I’ve got a real interest in your history. I’ve been reading about some of your great deeds as Saint Cethleann, but I bet none of the texts do you real justice. I’d rather hear it right from the source. About all your adventures and especially against Nemesis.”</p>
<p>“That is indeed a great story,” Flayn says then, every bit as dignified as she is drunk.</p>
<p>“So? If we already know your big secret, why not tell it?” Claude prods.</p>
<p>Flayn still hesitates. But when Claude takes the opportunity to propose his own wild take, Flayn must see to judiciously correcting him, setting the stage for a dramatic account of Seiros and the Saints versus Nemesis and The Ten Elites.</p>
<p>“Hold up,” Claude interrupts, “The Ten Elites? The Church says they were on your side.”</p>
<p>“No,” she says, subdued again. “They came to aid Nemesis after he’d committed great evil against us.”</p>
<p>Silence uncomfortably reigns, Edelgard sitting with an unsettling feeling that Claude puts a voice to.</p>
<p>“Massacring the goddess and her children?” He looks a little sickly himself. “That’s their source of their Relics, isn’t it?” His brows draw together, expressing a new thought now. “And… their Crests? Passed through bloodlines… Stolen blood?”</p>
<p>Flayn gapes.</p>
<p>“That just leaves… the Crest Stones, really, and those—” He does not miss Flayn’s tell as her hand clenches over her heart. “<em>Their bones, their blood, their hearts,</em>” he repeats in quick succession, presenting her own words back to her. “Their <em>hearts</em>?”</p>
<p>“Truly,” Flayn exclaims, “how do you know all that you do?” And Edelgard, too, cannot help but be taken aback by all he has connected in such short order—marvelling even.</p>
<p>She traces the movement of his lashes as they sweep low, his lips ticking up in another disarming smile. “We’re pretty resourceful,” Claude dismisses. “But the thing I don’t get is if that’s all true, why would Rhea change that story? Why redeem the Ten Elites when they really hurt you?”</p>
<p>Flayn contemplates her cup, now emptied. “By the end of the war the blood of their descendants was already flowing with our own. Rhea thought it would be better to take them in than to try and cast them all out. That we could still use that connection.”</p>
<p>“Control the narrative, yeah, Rhea seems to love to do that,” Claude responds with a touch of cynicism that truly satisfies.</p>
<p>Not so for Flayn. “It was only done in protection,” she protests, but Claude will not fight her, waving her on.</p>
<p>“Sorry,” he says tiredly, “finish off your story.”</p>
<p>Though she frowns, Flayn does gather herself to perfunctorily finish, and in his accolades Claude is purposefully generous, complimenting Flayn long enough for her to actually grow embarrassed at the attention.</p>
<p>It’s only then that he continues with unsated curiosity, “But just how long can you live? How can you still look so young?”</p>
<p>“After the mighty battle I was greatly weakened. I fell into a long slumber. That is how we heal, you see. Now that I have finally woken up, I am slowly growing older again, but none of us rightly know just how far our lives might extend. We believe there might be no natural end.”</p>
<p>There is a new pause, more onerous for all that has been revealed, Edelgard’s shoulders nearly bowing from its weight if not for Claude working to move the conversation forward once more.</p>
<p>“Thank you for telling us all of that, Cethleann.” He shifts, uncharacteristically somber, his mouth pressing into a fine line. “But your trouble isn’t over, is it? Not for you, your father, or Rhea.” A little more delicately, then, he treads, “It seems like you’ve always faced those who are out for your blood. Even recently… with whoever was behind your kidnapping.”</p>
<p>“They were—” Flayn starts, then stops short, something clearly unspoken.</p>
<p>Claude tries again, tenacious still in his search for information. “Hey, don’t forget you’re talking to two of Fódlan’s future leaders here. We can help you if you know anything.”</p>
<p>Nervously, Flayn bites at her lip. “We do think the events of the past may be connected to the evil we are facing now.”</p>
<p>“And <em>who were</em>—” Edelgard pronounces, nearly losing control as Claude closely looks upon her. She swallows. “Who are those people? What do you know about them?”</p>
<p>Flayn’s gaze turns inward. “Ages ago they were the Agarthans, named after the civilization built before even Fódlan’s time. Their forces now we do not know much about, but we first faced them when they laid waste to this land, two millennia ago. They’re the ones who directed Nemesis in his massacre and in collecting his spoils—making him into the threat that he was.”</p>
<p>It is all Edelgard can do, suddenly, to stay upright, the words repeating endlessly through her mind. All of it—all of it too close a mirror to Edelgard’s own life.</p>
<p>Directed Nemesis. Made him into a threat. Against who? The Church’s kind. How? By using the power of their enemies. Their bodies, their blood—</p>
<p><em>Their</em> blood? Whose exactly?</p>
<p>Her own pounds dizzyingly through her skull, three apparent bloodlines intermingled: hers, Sei—Rhea’s, and the King of Liberation’s—</p>
<p>“Nemesis,” she says, voice raw as the realization claws at her. “His bloodline. The Crest of Flames—”</p>
<p>Flayn’s hand falls across her face, forlorn and mournful. “Belonging to Sothis.”</p>
<p>Against Edelgard’s skin comes the cold sensation of metal, felt now like no time has passed at all—tearing and cutting her open.</p>
<p>The exclamation of victory, when she’d lost everything. The acrid whisper in the dark, delivered at her ear.</p>
<p>“<em>You are our greatest creation, made to reforge this world.</em>”</p>
<p>She’d believed she could. It was all she’d had.</p>
<p>She is shaking. She does not know when she’d started. Her cup, still full, clatters to the ground, both Claude and Flayn’s heads turning toward her.</p>
<p>“Edelgard,” Claude says, but she cannot answer. Just another arm’s length between them and yet he is a world away.</p>
<p>“Are you all right?” Flayn babbles drunkenly, fervent but just as distant. “Did you drink too much? Would you like some water? Or are you—?”</p>
<p>“Cethleann,” Claude says, and she quiets.</p>
<p>Her own name reaches Edelgard again as if carried by the faintest breeze, and she realizes there is a faint breeze, the window open now as a cup of water in fact appears before her. She takes one sip and thinks better of it, returning it to Claude’s possession.</p>
<p>“I think this might be where we have to end our night,” Claude says, apologetic to Flayn, and it’s that threat that helps bring Edelgard back to rights.</p>
<p>“It is them again,” she wrenches out, then remembers she must not show the full extent of her growing certainty. “It must be. It is too much of a coincidence.” She stares Flayn down, armed with a name she has never had for all her years of suffering and complicity.</p>
<p>Agarthans. And she to wage their war against— She reaches for a word she still does not possess. Beasts? Children of the goddess? No.</p>
<p>“Only tell me…” she implores, “what your kind is, too.”</p>
<p>“My kind?” Flayn repeats, taken aback.</p>
<p>“Sothis was not really a goddess. A powerful being, to be sure, but not a deity,” Edelgard argues, holding to at least this ground still. “None of you are.”</p>
<p>At Edelgard’s undisguised anger, Flayn grows staunch, elucidating, “Sothis was a great celestial being as the scriptures say and as much of a deity as any being can be. Long ago, she used her blood to create descendants known as the Nabateans. That is—that is who we are. No more and no less.”</p>
<p>“How does all of this keep making <em>less</em> sense?” Claude interjects, his hair wild now the more he rucks a hand through it. But he can barely let the question hang, unanswered, before he tries to make some sense of it still. “Your key figures. You, Saint Cethleann. Your father, Saint Cichol. The other saints... are they also survivors of the massacre? Are there more Nabateans out there?”</p>
<p>Flayn faces her loss again, shrinking with it. “It is just us four left…”</p>
<p>“And so where are they?” Edelgard insists.</p>
<p>“Elsewhere,” Flayn relays, her response delayed as she stiffens against her approaching stupor. She shakes her head as if to rouse herself. “Outside Fódlan and choosing to live away from people.”</p>
<p>If only all of them had chosen the same, Edelgard thinks bitterly. Instead— No, she would not travel down that line of thought to only deal in useless hypotheticals.</p>
<p>“One last thing,” Claude says, Flayn dropping off in earnest now. “It’s nowhere in the doctrine, but—do you know anything about the goddess being able to manipulate time? Could you manipulate it? Rhea? Seteth?”</p>
<p>Flayn squints at him, eyes half closed. “I think Sothis had some influence over it… though she is gone now and so is that power. We do not possess it.”</p>
<p>“Is it possible for time to act up on its own then?” Claude persists, desperate to pose the question before he loses her. “Here, at the monastery, I mean.”</p>
<p>Flayn’s eyes flutter shut. “This is a holy place that shelters what remains of our kind, even Sothis, but... again, she is gone. I do not know how it could ever…”</p>
<p>Her head lolls, sleep claiming her and Claude’s own face falls into his hands, his body going as still and as taut as all of Edelgard’s lingering loose threads—ensnared now and threatening to come undone if she were to make even one wrong movement.</p>
<p>Fixed in place, Edelgard sits there as the moment stretches endlessly on, trying to reconcile the impossible. To possess the knowledge she now holds and yet be unable to do anything with it—to be more unable than ever to confront those who had fed her an incomplete version of the truth. Those who had harmed and misdirected her and made her into what she was—</p>
<p>Abruptly, Claude goes slack and sighs, picking himself back up and Flayn along with him as she precariously veers off the stack of books she is still perched upon. Unperturbed, she slumbers on as he shifts her onto his bed then slumps down to prop himself up against it. Across his forehead his fingers splay, his mind obviously still at work.</p>
<p>Slowly, his hand drifts down so that he might make a study of it, scrutinizing the veins and capillaries that snake across his wrist and palm.</p>
<p>“To think all this time Crests were stolen bloodlines… That I carry that legacy of violence with me…” His eyes shine out at her in the near darkness, the candlelight guttering in the late hour, and still, she has the unsettling thought of just how much of her he can really see.</p>
<p>Against the floorboards, her chair betrays a sound—betrays her as she cannot help but subtly shift in place.</p>
<p>“And you have the Crest of Seiros.” He frowns. “You must hate that.”</p>
<p>Disdain, in fact, finds its way into her response. “With the founding of the Empire, Seiros—” Her jaw strains, Edelgard still needing to correct herself. “Rhea gifted the emperor her blood. And so my family’s bloodline has always been intertwined with hers.”</p>
<p>“From everything we’ve heard, that may be the one time a Crest has been peaceably granted,” marvels Claude.</p>
<p>“Peaceable or not,” she says venomously, “I’d wish for no Crest at all.”</p>
<p>Claude flags further, his shoulders curving inward. “There were so many times I thought nothing would become of me…” And it is on nothing at all that his hand clenches, the veins of his wrist pushing up more prominently against his skin. “The only reason I’m here and even recognized as the future heir to House Riegan is my Crest. I knew it was my greatest opportunity and I used that to my advantage. Let myself dream because of it. But the more I find out, the more unsettling it all becomes. The intermarriage, the disinheritance, the power leveraging—all over the spoils of an actual massacre...”</p>
<p>“Crests are monstrous things,” she responds, her last vestiges of passion wearing away what remains of her voice’s careful precision. “They make monsters of people either from the possession of them or the want of possession, and it all goes back to those beasts—” Her tongue trips over the word, remembering the other name she has now, too.</p>
<p>And so she tries it. “Back to the Nabateans that are still living among us, venerating their own blood through the Crest system.”</p>
<p>On the bed, Flayn’s breathing shifts as if she obliquely knows she is being talked about. When Claude speaks next, it is muted but no less intent. “Hearing you call them beasts…”</p>
<p>She tenses as he pauses, thinking he means to challenge her on this point as well. Instead, it is in an unexpected direction that his thoughts stray. “That’s exactly what they call others from outside Fódlan. To divide and dehumanize.”</p>
<p>“What need does the Church have for the larger world and other ways of being?” she questions with acid tongue. “It is only interested in retaining its control here, including over our political affairs.”</p>
<p>His regard is starker for the shadows that cast about them. “And free thought.”</p>
<p>Edelgard hardly knows which of her own thoughts to entertain, holding his gaze now, but freely they do come—evoking the anguish of both past and present.</p>
<p>Too freely, in that they might overwhelm her if not for his stare getting the better of her first, her skin prickling as warmth rises to her face in spite of the cold winter night.</p>
<p>But so long as he makes a study of her, she takes the opportunity to study him back, all her preconceptions of him juxtaposed against the person she remains trapped with in a moment of time. Still unknown to her and yet—</p>
<p>“It’s only a ruse,” she finally contends.</p>
<p>“What?” he asks, caught off guard in the end.</p>
<p>She leans closer in, striving for conviction and steadfastness where she might still find it, even if it is only in her assessment of him. Anything to keep the night’s despair at bay for even a moment longer.</p>
<p>“Your nonchalance and careless demeanor. Your antics and fatuous ploys. It’s all just a ruse to disarm others, isn’t it? But you care. You care a lot and you’ve always been far more serious than you let on.” She looks to Flayn, to the covers tucked in around her at his own doing. “And for all your seeming underhandedness and capacity for manipulation, you don’t have much bite at all.”</p>
<p>He offers up just the trace of low laughter. “Not even going to give me any credit for our encounter with Rhea? Even after I up and died?”</p>
<p>“You only fought her at my behest,” she counters. “You’d have preferred to talk circles around her, wouldn’t you? My point still holds.”</p>
<p>“And here I thought you liked how I tore Rhea apart, word by word. Or didn’t you enjoy that?”</p>
<p>Her tongue stills, so ready for a retort that does not come—knowing that there is truth to his words for her to still remember the scene and his magnetism as vividly as she does. But with Edelgard held by that same magnetism now, he does not press the issue. Rather, he actually answers to her assertion.</p>
<p>“I don’t know if I’d say it’s all a ruse. Where does one begin and end? The best ones borrow from you, after all. An exaggeration of yourself of sorts. And over time any facade you put on to face the world can become a part of you.”</p>
<p>It is more than she ever would have expected from him until he redirects once more, this time to make her into the unwitting target between them. “Go ahead and stop me if any of this sounds familiar.”</p>
<p>“Familiar?” she derides even as she registers the clammy touch of sweat breaking out across her neck.</p>
<p>“Yeah, or do you not have any facade of your own or any hidden depths? Is what you show the world all you really are? Exacting, unyielding, and with little need of others or feeling?”</p>
<p>A new tremor travels throughout her body, momentarily arresting her.</p>
<p>Her memory fails her on so many counts, but she knows she is not as she once was. Not carefree—never carefree—but at least she’d once had its approximation. The greater, longing hope that she might truly be one day.</p>
<p>But that was a lifetime ago. A different one, perhaps. Back before she’d known the absolute depths of loss, back before her ambitions had stamped out any remaining part of her existence. And now with them no longer in reach—</p>
<p>Her tremor finds its way into her words as they escape her. “Whoever else I was died long ago.”</p>
<p>“I don’t know,” he says, tilting his head at her. “Sometimes I think I still see hints of someone else. Some softness to even you.”</p>
<p>She flushes to know he’d already seen her at her weakest and most wanting—the hints of loneliness and vulnerability he has pierced through. Claude, a witness to her tears already.</p>
<p>Her throat works as if tears are not far off again. “You’re mistaken.”</p>
<p>“Then I’m sorry for it,” he says. Such few words, coming from him, but never more genuine.</p>
<p>Again, she calls upon her temper. For it to flare back to life to force greater distance between them. But there is so little left within her to spark, the embers of her spirit doused and ashen.</p>
<p>Too despondent, she says, “And what good is that?”</p>
<p>If she were to start to mourn her own circumstances—to mourn her loss—she might never stop, and what would that accomplish then? How would that help see her through this unceasing night?</p>
<p>The silence is so potent that it settles into her bones, its each disruption a jarring and painful reverberation. The wind batting up against the window’s swaying shutters. An owl, calling. A quiet scuffling across the floorboards—like rats scampering, running their claws and teeth over the ground, over bodies. Over her own, over—</p>
<p>Out from the greater darkness it is Claude’s eyes that peer at her still, but it’s just the glimmer of Herleva’s eyes that she sees, gone chillingly blank.</p>
<p>Always the eyes—out of everything—that caught the faintest traces of light.</p>
<p>“It is not me who even needs to be mourned,” she says, and she fears it is her own eyes that are shining in earnest now, tears threatening her vision.</p>
<p>“Then who?” he asks, unable not to, and then proves his perceptiveness is just as much of a threat as she’d thought it might be. “Your family?”</p>
<p>She goes even stiller than the night.</p>
<p>Their deaths were common knowledge for anyone who might go looking—impossible to conceal the loss of nearly an entire royal succession line no matter the prevailing rumor or story—and of course Claude would have done just that.</p>
<p>She steels herself for him to question those stories’ integrity with her now, rooting out another mystery, but instead he pulls back. “Sorry,” he says, faltering so uncharacteristically over just the single word.</p>
<p>Again, a lull as the night comes to its final stretch. Ahead, the unbearable mockery of choice with no meaningful options available to them. The question, still, of what now with the future out of reach—with the past instead upon her, demanding a response she has never properly given.</p>
<p>Her brother, still calling— “<em>El!</em>”</p>
<p>She nearly startles to hear Claude clear his throat as he settles on a course. “I’m going to see what more I can find out about these Agarthans. They’re clearly the other half of a larger puzzle—maybe even our puzzle—and someone around might know something more about them. Maybe even have some ties or connections, considering the trouble they’ve managed to cause at the monastery.”</p>
<p>It is all she can do to not careen into helpless laughter. Not at him, but at this end he’s arrived at with her his unknown quarry, trapped already.</p>
<p>And yet with none of the answers he will want, for all her years spent under Those Who—the Agarthans’ heel.</p>
<p>He considers her, entreating. “What do you say? Are you still with me?”</p>
<p>With dead certainty, she knows she is not—that she could never follow him down that path. That it is no path—no future—at all, just more despair, unrelenting.</p>
<p>She is breathing, but only just, her breaths coming too fast—too loud and too shallow—as she slowly goes lightheaded.</p>
<p>“Hey,” he doubles back, drawing his own conclusions with her distress too apparent. He reaches for her, just the uncertain and fleeting brush of his fingers, again against her knee. “Really, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have just brought that up like that.”</p>
<p>There is nothing she can say, knowing he has not even truly misread her, those deaths all too present now and Edelgard having no means—no purpose—with which to bury them anew.</p>
<p>“I won’t pretend to know what that might be like,” Claude defers, and of course he could not, how could he have even the faintest idea of her pain and loss? The thought of anyone even beginning to be capable of comprehending is—</p>
<p>No, that is not quite right she thinks as the night slows to its last crawl, inching towards the false promise of day.</p>
<p>And a name dawns on her even if the sun will not.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>For ages now I've been obsessed with the fronts these two present to the world and have wanted them to pick each other's apart.</p>
<p>Also still a general supporter of the Fódlan Mom Agenda. If you like, you can find a fic I wrote about Khalid and his mom (and language and agency) <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25829599">here</a>. </p>
<p>I will see you next time for our fallout.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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